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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.
Mikhail Tikhonchev, Artem Muralev, Vyacheslav Svetukhin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 91-99
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-721
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The present paper is devoted to radiation damage simulation of Fe-9at.%Cr binary alloy with twin grain boundaries (GBs) by the molecular dynamics method. Evaluations of specific energy of five GBs and sizes of corresponding GB regions have been obtained for iron and FeCr alloy at temperatures of 0 and 300 K. The binding energies of the vacancy, self-interstitial atom (SIA) and substitutional Cr atom to the GB in pure Fe have been estimated. The results showed that GB regions are energetically preferable for the point defects. Interaction of 10 keV displacement cascades with the GBs has been studied. The tendency to accumulate at the GB region has been shown for produced defects. Some quantitative results which describe features of radiation damage nearby the GB have been obtained. It is revealed that Cr fraction in SIAs inside the GB region is slightly lower than that in the initial alloy matrix. Cr fraction in interstitial configurations outside the GB region is almost three times as high. However, no remarkable chromium redistribution nearby the GB has been detected.
