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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.
Wanjing Wang, Qiang Li, Sixiang Zhao, Shengping Chang, Yue Xu, Zhenmao Chen, Zhensheng Yuan, Yingli Shi, Sigui Qin, Lingjian Peng, Guohui Liu, Guang-Nan Luo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 125-130
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-772
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recently, the EAST W/Cu divertor components, including the ITER-like monoblock W/Cu units and flat-type W/Cu units, have been developed by Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) in collaboration with Advanced Technology and Materials Co., Ltd. (AT&M). To detect the bonding quality in these multiple layer geometry W/Cu plasma-facing components (PFCs) at each step of their manufacture, special nondestructive testing techniques have been researched and developed. For monoblock W/Cu PFCs, the bonding at both W-Cu and Cu-CuCrZr interfaces was qualified by spiral ultrasonic testing (UT) with a focus probe, which was inserted into the CuCrZr tube with a flexible driving tube. Artificial defects with defined size have been measured by UT and compared with the results of high heat flux testing (HHFT). The HHFT demonstrated that the monoblock W/Cu mock-up qualified by this UT has withstood 1000 cycles of heat load at 10 MW/m2. The bonding quality of flat-type W/Cu mock-ups has also been inspected by the usual water-gap UT. The results from HHFT at 5 MW/m2 demonstrated that the present UT was unreliable for the quality control of the flat-type W/Cu PFCs.
