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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.
R. W. Moir, J. D. Lee
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 619-623
Blanket Design and Evaluation | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24812
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We adapted the helium-cooled, FLiBe-breeder blanket to the commercial tandem-mirror fusion-reactor design, MINIMARS. Vanadium was used to achieve high performance from the high-energy-release neutron-capture reactions and from the high-temperature operation permitted by the refractory property of the material, which increases the conversion efficiency and decreases the helium-pumping power. Although this blanket had the highest performance among the MINIMARS blankets designs, measured by Mnth (blanket energy multiplication times thermal conversion efficiency), it had a cost of electricity (COE) 18% higher than the University of Wisconsin (UW) blanket design (42.5 vs 35.9 mills/kW·h). This increased cost was due to using higher-cost blanket materials (beryllium and vanadium) and a thicker blanket, which resulted in higher-cost central-cell magnets and the need for more blanket materials. Apparently, the high efficiency does not substantially affect the COE. Therefore, in the future, we recommend lowering the helium temperature so that ferritic steel can be used. This will result in a lower-cost blanket, which may compensate for the lower performance resulting from lower efficiency.
