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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.
S. X. Zhao, F. Liu, S. G. Qin, J. P. Song, G.-N. Luo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 225-229
Materials Development | 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-A18081
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first attempt at developing chopped W fiber-reinforced W (Wf/W) composites without an engineered interface or inter-phase employing hot isostatic pressing (HIP) has been made in order to study the feasibility of the powder metallurgy (PM) fabrication methodology. Micro-structures and flexural properties of sintered compacts have been examined by an optical microscope (OM), a scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with an electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD) instrument and three-point bending (3PB) tests. There are some chrysan-themum-like grains around each fiber in W matrices. Mechanical properties, namely strength and pseudo-plasticity, of the sintered compacts are far from satisfactory. Abnormal grain growth does not seem to have a preferential growing direction according to EBSD results. Possible causes for the abnormal grain growth and further mechanical property optimizations are hereby presented.
