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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. Nakamichi, J. H. Kim
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 157-162
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-745
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Advanced neutron multipliers with low swelling and high stability at high temperatures are desired for the pebble bed blankets of demonstration fusion power (DEMO) reactors. Beryllium intermetallic compounds (beryllides) such as Be12Ti are the most promising material for this purpose. To fabricate the beryllide pebbles, a new granulation process has been established that combines a plasma sintering method for beryllide synthesis and a rotating electrode method using a plasma-sintered electrode for granulation. In trial granulation examinations, prototypic beryllide pebbles 1 mm in diameter were successfully fabricated. This study describes the results of a crush test and the characterization of the oxidation properties of the prototypic beryllide pebbles compared with those of Be pebbles. The crush test revealed that the prototypic beryllide pebble was more brittle than a Be pebble, and its crush load is one-third that of a Be pebble. The oxidation experiment showed that the weight gain ratios of the prototypic beryllide pebbles were significantly smaller than those of pure Be pebbles. The results confirmed that the prototypic beryllide pebbles have better oxidation resistance than pure Be pebbles.
