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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
H. H. Toudeshki, F. Najmabadi, X. R. Wang, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 675-679
Test Blanket, Fuel Cycle, and Breeding | 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/FST12-550
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As a part of ARIES-ACT research, we have been performing a detailed re-examination of requirements and design of vacuum vessels for fusion power plants. This paper discusses structural analysis performed in support of this examination. We have performed parametric 3-dimensional finite element analyses of ARIES-ACT-type vacuum vessels. The vacuum vessel structure is subjected to different types of loads such as atmospheric pressure, weight of the vessel itself and off-normal loads such as over-pressurization due to a leak in fusion core components, electromagnetic forces from disruptions, etc. Ribbed structure is considered in order to minimize the thickness of the vacuum vessel as well as to cool the system. We will discuss our results including structural response to various loads and trade-offs among structural design choices.
