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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.
Alice Ying, Hongjie Zhang, Joseph Mauricio Garde, Mike Ulrickson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 309-314
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/FST13-A18095
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of Be tile size on the stress exerted on the CuCrZr heat sink for the ITER EHF finger was examined. The study especially focused on the areas beneath the tiles that are exposed to the high convective heat flux. For reference, in a Be tile size of 50x50x8 mm3, the calculated equivalent strain range using elastic analysis for the path of interest through the side wall of the CuCrZr heat sink resulted in a peak value at the inner wall of ~0.492%. The corresponding fatigue lifetime of the heat sink locally is unacceptably low, 1400 cyclic operations. By using smaller tiles, lower stress amplitudes are observed due to a smaller deformation. In this paper, the total strain range under ITER projected pulsed operating conditions is analyzed for a range of Be tile sizes. The analysis model uses a complete pair of twin fingers as opposed to a sub-model of two tiles. The paper documents the calculated cyclic lifetime of the ITER EHF CuCrZr heat sink with respect to Be tile size and peak heat loads by evaluating the total strain range both from elastic and time independent elasto-plastic analyses for repeated cycle.
