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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
S. Bhandarkar, J. Reynolds, S. Letts, S. Baxamusa, E. Lindsey
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 177-189
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-TFM20-33
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is well known that control of the intricate surface topography details of the ablator capsule over a wide range of modes is critical for inertial confinement fusion (ICF). Whereas considerable effort has been expended on making the ablator capsule rounder and smoother during its fabrication, it is only more recently that attention has been drawn to particulate contamination on the surface of the capsule that can also contribute to undesirable Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. In this paper, we explore new methods for cleaning the soft polymeric capsule in the presence of the attached filltube just before its assembly into the final target. These constraints, in conjunction with the extremely demanding specification for the size and the number of particles allowed per specification, present unique challenges and require the implementation of specialized cleaning techniques. Here, we describe the strengths and limitations of these methods and lay out the platform for implementing these into production on the National Ignition Facility (NIF).
