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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.
T. Nishimura, T. Hatano, T. Honda, M. Saito
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 237-241
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Divertor and Plasma-Facing Components | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A340
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long pulse operation is assumed in ITER and future reactors. If the first wall has a defect, the crack may be propagated by cyclic thermal loads. In addition, flattop of more than 300 sec during plasma burning is expected, therefore, an effect of transient creep must be included. In order to simulate a severe temperature gradient in the first wall, an experimental facility was designed using an electron beam (EB) as a heat source, which has a distinct feature that the various plasma burning scenarios can be simulated by controlling the beam power so as to make surface temperature of the specimen to be fixed. To clarify the crack growth mechanism and the effects of transient creep, elastic-plastic stress analysis and creep analysis were performed. It is concluded that the creep effect during the operation duration period enlarges the residual tensile stress in the cooling period, and that consequently the crack propagation length increases.