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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Jing Zhao, Yongwei Yang, Sicong Xiao, Zhiwei Zhou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 521-524
Fusion Technologies: Heating and Fueling | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 2) Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A19145
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Progress on the fusion-fission hybrid reactor (FFHR) brings fusion a viable energy source in foreseeable future. Energy multiplication in a FFHR makes a much easier prerequisite for the fusion reaction than a fusion reactor. The molten salt reactor has advantages on heat transfer and post-processing of the spent fuels. A fission blanket made of molten salt was studied for the FFHR. The molten salt consists of F-Li-Be, with nuclear fuels dissolved in it. When thorium-uranium-plutonium fuels were added into a F-Li-Be molten salt zone with a component of 71% LiF -2% BeF2 -13.5% ThF4 -8.5% UF4 -5% PuF3, the appropriate blanket energy multiplication factor and TBR can be obtained. Two different molten salt models (Single molten salt zone model and multi molten salt zone model) were designed and compared in this study. The changes in blanket multiplication factor, M, and the tritium breeding ratio, TBR, during burnup life are investigated. The burnup analysis of the molten salt blanket was carried out by the COUPLE2 code. Through the burnup analysis, the breeding of the fissile fuel 233U and the transmutation of the minor actinides were also studied.
