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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.
Y. Hishinuma, T. Tanaka, T. Shinkawa, S. Murakami, K. Matsuda, T. Watanabe, T. Nagasaka, A. Sagara, T. Muroga
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 221-227
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-762
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Erbium oxide (Er2O3) coating layer is one of the suitable coatings to realize an advanced breeding blanket system because it has high electrical resistivity and hydrogen permeation suppression effect. In order to enhance these properties of Er2O3 coating, it is necessary to form a thick coating layer with high crystallinity. The formation of a double stacked coating layer on an austenitic stainless steel 316 substrate using an intermediate layer (buffer layer) was investigated for the thicker and high crystallinity of Er2O3 coating formation. Yttrium oxide (Y2O3) and cerium oxide (CeO2) were selected as buffer layer between the Er2O3 layer and austenitic stainless steel 316 substrate due to their similar lattice constant to that of Er2O3 crystal. The texture and grain growth direction of Er2O3 was controlled by the Y2O3 and CeO2 buffer layer. However, the suppression effect of hydrogen permeation by the double stacked coating was smaller than that of the single layer coating due to the thin Er2O3 formation.