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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.
M. Nieto, D. N. Ruzic, J. P. Allain
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 232-236
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Divertor and Plasma-Facing Components | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A339
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Flowing Liquid Surface Retention Experiment (FLIRE) has been built and designed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide fundamental experimental data on the retention and pumping of He, H and other species in flowing liquid surfaces. These measurements are critical to the development of advanced plasma-facing components (PFCs) that apply flowing liquid metals to mitigate high heat loads encountered in the divertor region of next-step fusion reactors. The FLIRE facility currently uses an ion beam source, which injects ions into a flowing stream of liquid lithium. Its design allows the liquid lithium to flow between two vacuum chambers that become isolated from each other when the lithium flows. Recent results show retention of helium in flowing liquid lithium at 250-300 °C to be of the order 10-4 and diffusivities of 10-4 to 10-3 cm2/sec.
