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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Yu. Igitkhanov, R. Fetzer, B. Bazylev, L. Boccaccini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 100-105
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-732
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal performance of different modules of plasma-facing components (PFCs) is analyzed for the DEMO reactor conditions in steady-state operation with the inclusion of the transient edge-localized modes (ELMs) for mitigated and unmitigated cases. As an example, the effect of these loads is considered for the tungsten (W) alloy mono-block design with a Cu OFHC/EUROFER water coolant tube first proposed in the framework of the Power Plant Physics and Technology (PPP&T) divertor study. A variant of this design with a EUROFER tube connected to the W block with a diamond/copper composite (DCC) used in the diagnostic windows is also analyzed. A design goal is to find the optimal thicknesses of material layers that allow one to keep the maximum temperatures within the allowable design limits under ITER water cooling conditions. Heat transfer and armor erosion due to the plasma impact has been modeled by using the MEMOS code.
