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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
C.P.C. Wong, R.F. Bourque, E.T. Cheng, R.L. Creedon, K.R. Schultz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 633-640
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-A24814
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Elongated Tokamak (ET) is an innovative concept that uses a highly elongated plasma (plasma height-to-width ratio of 6–10) to allow high plasma currrent and high toroidal betas. ET has the potential for the development of small-size, high-power density, low-cost fusion reactors using normal conducting coils. The elongated plasma shape is achieved by use of a continuous stack of PF coils parallel to the plasma surface on both inbound and outbound sides. To achieve plasma stability, these coil stacks must be located no further than one plasma minor radius from the plasma edge, greatly restricting the space available for blankets. In order to assess the potential of a small reactor, we evaluated and designed blankets 30 to 40 cm thick. Three different thin blanket designs were found to be acceptable: FLiBe self-cooled, helium-cooled lithium, and helium-cooled 17Li83Pb blanket designs. A lithium-cooled integrated blanket-coil design (BLITZ-coil) was also found to be suitable for the ET commercial reactor.