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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
D.A. O'Brien, D. Steiner, M.J. Embrechts, L. Deutch, P. Gierszewski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1611-1616
Solid Breeder Blanket | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24962
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recently proposed blanket concept using water coolant with dissolved lithium compounds for breeding employs water cooled first walls. Water cooled first walls for blankets have also been proposed for some solid breeder blankets. Design options for water cooled first walls are examined in this paper. Four geometries and three materials are analyzed for water coolant at 300°C and 13.8 MPa (2000 psi). Maximum neutron wall loads (with surface heat loads being 25% of neutron wall load) are determined for each geometry and material combination. Of the materials studied, only vanadium alloy is found to be capable of withstanding high wall loads (>10 MW/m2 neutron and >2.5 MW/m2 heat)
