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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
H. Streckert, K. Blobaum, B. Chen, J. E. Fair, N. Hein, A. Nikroo, K. Quan, M. Stadermann
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 213-217
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-TFM20-18
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Depleted uranium (DU) hohlraums consist of a sputter-deposited DU layer sandwiched between two sputter-deposited layers of gold and overcoated with a thick electrodeposited gold layer. Production of a multilayered system of dissimilar materials to tight tolerances requires a complex set of process steps. Process drift in production of DU hohlraums resulted in increased failures and led to unacceptably low production yields. Characterization of this failure mechanism indicated poor adhesion between dissimilar layers. Failure of one layer could be traced to the preceding layer. Ultimately, failures were traced to pretreatment of the mandrel for the initial deposition. Pretreatment of the mandrel involves an ion-etch step, which had drifted. Maintenance of the ion gun resulted in improved mandrels and improved process yields. Production yields from the DU sputter deposition were low with failures due to blistering and delamination. Oxidation of the DU due to gettering of residual oxygen or water in the sputter chamber was hypothesized. A process change was implemented to minimize the time between the DU and gold coatings. The change required removal of one production part to incorporate one additional gold sputter source. The production run was thus reduced from five parts to four parts. However, the production yield increased significantly, by 30%.