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September 8–11, 2025
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. D. Rader, B. H. Mills, D. L. Sadowski, M. Yoda, S. I. Abdel-Khalik
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 282-287
Divertor and High-Heat-Flux Components | 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/FST12-544
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental investigation of the thermal performance of the Helium-Cooled Multi-Jet (HEMJ) modular divertor design developed by the Karlsruhe Research Center (FZK) was previously performed at Georgia Tech using air at Reynolds numbers (Re) spanning those at which the actual He-cooled divertor is to be operated. More recently, another experimental investigation was performed by the Georgia Tech group for a similar finger-type divertor module using both air and He as coolants. The results of these experiments suggest that, in addition to matching Re, dynamic similarity between the air and He experiments requires that a correction be made to account for the differences in the relative contributions of convection and conduction (through the divertor walls) to the overall heat removal rate by the module. This correction factor depends on the thermal conductivity ratio of the solid to the coolant. Experiments similar to those previously conducted have therefore been performed using air, argon, or He as coolant for test sections constructed of brass or steel thus covering a wide range of thermal conductivity ratio. The resultant correlation between Re, the heat removal rate, and the thermal conductivity ratio from these experiments can be used to predict the thermal performance of HEMJlike divertors at prototypical operating conditions.