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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
J. L. Weaver et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 194-200
IFE | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent designs for laser driven, direct drive inertial confinement fusion (ICF) indicate that substantial gains (G>100) might be achieved with lower total laser energy (E~500 kJ) than previously considered possible. A leading contender is the shock ignition approach which compresses low aspect ratio pellets with high intensity laser pulses (1015 W/cm2) before achieving ignition with a final higher intensity spike (1016 W/cm2). Excimer laser systems based on a krypton-fluoride (KrF) medium are particularly well suited to these new ideas as they operate in the ultraviolet (248 nm), provide highly uniform illumination, possess large bandwidth (1-3 THz), and can easily exploit beam zooming to improve laser-target coupling for the final spike pulse. This paper will examine target physics advantages of KrF lasers in relation to the new implosion designs and the balancing of hydrodynamic instability and laser-plasma instabilities. Supporting experimental and theoretical studies of are being conducted by the Nike laser group at the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory. Recent experimental work has also shown that the high ablation pressures and smooth profiles obtained with the Nike laser can be used to accelerate planar targets to velocities consistent with the requirements of impact ignition.
