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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.
C. H. Skinner, C. A. Gentile, R. Doerner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 1 | July 2013 | Pages 1-7
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A17041
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Practical methods to clean ITER's diagnostic mirrors will be essential to ITER's plasma operations. We report on laser cleaning of candidate ITER single-crystal molybdenum mirrors that were plasma coated with either carbon or beryllium films 150 to 420 nm thick. A pulsed Nd laser beam was focused to 1 to 2 J/cm2 and scanned at various speeds across the surface of a mirror. The cleaning effect was measured with a novel method that combined microscopic imaging and reflectivity measurements in the red, green, and blue spectral regions and at the H-alpha and H-beta wavelengths. No damage of the molybdenum mirror substrates was observed at the range of laser intensities used. For carbon-coated mirrors, complete removal of the film and restoration of the reflectivity were measured in some conditions. For the beryllium-coated mirrors, restoration of reflectivity has so far been incomplete. Heat transfer calculations suggest a shorter, [approximately]5-ns laser pulse would be optimal.
