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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.
Igor Kupriyanov, Nikolay Porezanov, George Nikolaev, Liudmila Kurbatova, Vyacheslav Podkovyrov, Anatoly Muzichenko, Anatoly Zhitlukhin, Yury Gasparyan, Alexander Gervash
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 171-179
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-749
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beryllium will be used as a plasma-facing material for the ITER first wall. It is expected that erosion of beryllium under transient plasma loads such as the edge-localized modes (ELMs) and disruptions will determine the lifetime of the ITER first wall. The results of recent experiments with the Russian beryllium of TGP-56FW ITER grade on the QSPA-Be plasma gun facility are presented. The Be/CuCrZr mock-ups were tested by deuterium plasma and radiative streams both with pulse duration of 0.5 ms and heat loads of 0.5 and 0.4 MJ/m2, correspondingly. Experiments were performed at 250 °C. The beryllium mock-ups were exposed to up to 100 shots. After 10, 40 and 100 shots, the evolution of surface microstructure and crack morphology were investigated as well as beryllium mass loss under the erosion process. The deuterium retention in erosion products was also studied by the thermal desorption method.
