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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.
P. Norajitra, W. W. Basuki, L. Spatafora, U. Stegmaier
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 266-271
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-739
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A modular He-cooled divertor concept for DEMO has been pursued at KIT with the goal of reaching 10 MW/m2. The reference design uses small tungsten-based cooling fingers of about 20 mm in size. They consist of a tungsten tile as a thermal shield that is to be connected to a thimble heat sink structure from W–1 wt% La2O3 (WL10) tungsten alloy. The lower boundary of the divertor operating temperature window is predicted by the ductile-to-brittle temperature and the upper boundary by the recrystallization temperature of WL10 material, currently assumed at 600°C and 1300°C, respectively. The important requirements for the joint between the W tile and WL10 thimble are (a) functioning as a crack stopper, (b) resisting a high operating temperature of about 1200°C, and (c) using low-activation material as an interlayer. Previously used PdNi brazing material has been successfully tested at a brazing temperature of about 1270°C. The mock-ups produced in this way are sufficient for the HHF tests without neutrons. In a further step to approach the DEMO requirements with higher demands, the use of low-activating titanium with a melting point of 1668°C as bonding material was examined both for brazing and for diffusion welding of tungsten parts. This paper reports on the first successful test results of both high-temperature brazing and diffusion bonding techniques.