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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Peretz Levin, Nasr M. Ghoniem
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1634-1639
Solid Breeder Blanket | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24966
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a pressurized lobular blanket configuration is neutronically optimized. The blanket configuration features the use of beryllium and LiAlO2 solid breeder pins in a helium-cooled cross-flow pattern. One-dimensional neutronic optimization calculations are performed to maximize the tritium breeding ratio (TBR). The procedure involves spatial allocations of Be, LiAlO2, 9-C (low-activation ferritic steel), and He, in such a way as to maximize the TBR subject to several material, engineering and geometrical constraints. Consistent with all imposed engineering constraints, a TBR of 1.17 is achieved for a relatively thin blanket (≃43 cm depth).
