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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.
Michael T. Tobin, Wayne R. Meier, Edward C. Morse
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 679-685
Inertial Confinement Fusion Driver Technology | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24821
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have carried out further investigations of technical issues associated with using a compact torus (CT) accelerator as a driver for inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In a CT accelerator, a magnetically-confined, torus-shaped plasma is compressed, accelerated and focused by two concentric electrodes. Here, we evaluate an accelerator point design with a capacitor bank energy of 9.2 MJ. Modeled by a O–D code, the system produces a xenon plasma ring with a radius of 0.73 cm, a velocity of 4×107m/s, and a mass of 4.4 µg. The plasma ring energy available for fusion is 3.8 MJ, a 40% driver efficiency. Ablation and magnetic pressures of the point design, due to CT acceleration, are analyzed. Pulsed-power switching limitations and driver cost analysis are also presented. Our studies confirm the feasibility of producing a ring to induce fusion with acceptable gain. However, some uncertainties must be resolved to establish viability.
