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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.
Yu. Igitkhanov, B. Bazylev, I. Landman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 245-249
Plasma-Material Interactions | 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-A18084
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the steady-state operation the life-time performance of functional and structural materials in fusion reactor DEMO will be limited by several processes such as a sputtering erosion, transient events and neutron irradiation. The design strategy is to determine the structure and coating thicknesses which maximize component lifetime against all lifetime limitations. The sputtering erosion of the first wall tungsten armor layer due to the plasma impact during the steady state DEMO operation is considered here. It is shown that for DEMO conditions the total sputtering erosion of W armor by the charge-exchange DT neutrals could at least reach~1mm during one year of steady-state operation.
