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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.
Greg C. Randall, James Vecchio, Jack Knipping, Don Wall, Tane Remington, Paul Fitzsimmons, Matthew Vu, Emilio M. Giraldez, Brent E. Blue, Michael Farrell, Abbas Nikroo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 274-281
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/FST63-2-274
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Rippled metal foils are currently sought for high-strain-rate material strength studies at laser facilities. Because these metals typically cannot be diamond turned, we employ a microcoining process to imprint the [approximately]5-m-deep by [approximately]50-m-long ripples into the metal surface. This work details recent process developments to fabricate these rippled metal targets, specifically for iron and tantalum. The process consists of nitriding a steel die, diamond turning the die, and then pressing the die into a polished metal foil of choice. We show: advantages of deeper-nitrided dies, improved foil thickness uniformity and characterization, variation in coining stress over different materials, pattern quality characterization, bowing reduction, and patterning of multimode ripples.
