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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
Weiping Shen, Peng Li, Chulei Zhou, Shiliang Xu, Shuming Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 260-265
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-726
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A monoblock mockup for a divertor uses too much tungsten of high gravity. Segmentation of tungsten armor in the monoblock or macrobrush mockups can reduce excess thermal stress caused by the about 3.5 times difference of thermal expansion coefficient between CuCrZr and tungsten, but it is not enough to avoid cracking of the welding interface between tungsten and CuCrZr because of initial semibrittlement and embrittlement of the tungsten armor in service. In this paper, an interlayer of diamond/Cu composite was inserted between tungsten and CuCrZr to reduce the interfacial stress of welded dissimilar materials. Armor of laminated or macrobrush tungsten was designed to decrease the stress concentration of the welding interface. A Cu foil was inserted between the tungsten armor and the diamond/Cu composite to increase welding strength. The plasma-facing mockups made of W-diamond/Cu-CuCrZr or W-diamond/Cu-12Cr RAFM were designed after optimizing by thermal analysis using finite element method and were prepared by a cubic press for producing diamond. The welding properties and microstructures of the dissimilar materials were investigated. Several mockups were connected to prepare a plasma-facing component by penetrating a CuCrZr tube into several CuCrZr heat sinks. The thermal expansion coefficient of the diamond/Cu interlayer is near that of tungsten, and its thermal conductivity is higher than that of CuCrZr. Plastic copper foils can relax thermal stress to avoid cracking in the welding interface. So, this water-cooled plasma-facing component should be better to dissipate the high heat flux of the divertor in fusion reactors.