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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.
E. M. Giraldez, P. B. Mirkarimi, J. A. Emig, K. B. Fournier, H. Huang, J. S. Jaquez, E. C. Losbanos, M. J. May, J. D. Sain, M. E. Schoff, N. E. Teslich, M. T. Vu, R. J. Wallace
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 242-246
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-TFM20-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energy partitioning, energy coupling (EPEC) is one of the new experimental platforms being investigated at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to provide valuable data for national security applications. The EPEC target is a 7-m-thick silver spherical halfraum driven by a single NIF quad. This paper will describe the fabrication of the hollow spherical target, starting with the selection of the mandrel, the single-point diamond turning process used to achieve the desired thickness, and the final processing to remove the mandrel. Also discussed will be the metrology technique, X-ray opacity, used to determine the wall thickness and wall uniformity and how this nondestructive technique was benchmarked by two destructive characterization techniques, dual focused ion beam and scanning electron microscope, for wall thickness determination.