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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.
Jonathan K. Anderson, Samuel G. Durbin II, Dennis L. Sadowski, Minami Yoda, Said I. Abdel-Khalik, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 401-407
Technical Paper | Chambers and Chamber Wall Protection Methods | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A284
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fusion event in inertial fusion energy (IFE) reactors creates neutrons, photons, and charged particles that can damage the chamber first walls. The Prometheus design study used a high-speed thin film of molten lead injected tangential to the wall to protect the upper endcap of the reactor chamber from damaging X rays and target debris. To assure full chamber coverage, the film must remain attached. Film detachment under the influence of gravity is most likely to occur on the downward-facing surfaces over the upper endcap of the reactor chamber. Accurate numerical predictions of detachment length are effectively impossible in this turbulent flow because of difficulties in determining appropriate boundary conditions near the detachment point.As part of the ARIES-IFE study, experimental investigations of high-speed water films injected onto downward-facing planar surfaces at angles of inclination up to 45 deg below the horizontal were therefore performed. The initial growth and subsequent detachment of films with initial thickness up to 2 mm and injection speed up to 11 m/s were measured. To our knowledge, these experiments are the first to investigate the detachment of turbulent liquid films on downward-facing surfaces. The implications of these initial results on thin liquid protection and the "wet wall" concept are discussed.