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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
James K. Garner, Mohamed A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 837-847
Liquid-Metal Blankets and Magnetohydrodynamic Effects | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24842
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The work reported here attempts to: 1) define limits for the design windows for liquid metal breeders and coolants with various structural materials in various tokamak fusion reactors, and 2) quantify the impact of uncertainties in these limits on the design window. MHD pressure drop and heat transfer models are developed and used to quantify the effects of varying several tokamak reactor and blanket design parameters and materials properties. Uncertainties in the present pressure drop equations and calculational methods are also considered. Calculations are used to evaluate the impact of the coolant inlet temperature on the thermal cycle efficiency. An evaluation of the limits of uncertainty gives results ranging from a promising blanket candidate to a severely restricted design window, that would probably exclude self-cooled liquid metal blankets for large tokamaks from consideration. The major uncertainties in the design window result from the current lack of understanding of pressure drop and heat transfer in strong magnetic fields.