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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.
E. R. Koresheva, I. V. Aleksandrova, I. E. Osipov, S. V. Bazdenkov, V. I. Chtcherbakov, E. L. Koshelev, A. I. Nikitenko, S. M. Tolokonnikov, L. S. Yaguzinskiy, G. D. Baranov, A. I. Safronov, I. D. Timofeev, B. V. Kuteev, V. G. Kapralov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 290-300
Technical Paper | Targets and Target Protection During Injection | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A269
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lebedev Physical Institute conducts a wide research and development program to supply targets for inertial fusion energy (IFE) research. Current essential results in that area include the following: (a) A free-standing target (FST) system has been created, which allows the filling, layering, characterizing, and placing of targets into a test optical chamber by injection at a rate of 0.1 Hz, (b) a special physical layout has been developed to carry out the layering experiments in a wide range of target diameters including reactor scaled ones, and (c) the reconstruction algorithms and scan system are under way to complete the FST system with a new subsystem for univalent target characterization based on microtomography. Specific issues for future IFE target technology and injection research are discussed, which include (a) adding a small doping to the fuel to form a cryogenic layer in a glassy state, (b) using large shells with a metallic layer onto the outer surface to shorten the layering time for reactor targets, (c) the cell for target motion driving application to FST technology, and (d) designing a prototypical facility for repeatable target fabrication and injection.
