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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.
Ryan Sacks, Gregory Moses, Vincent Tang, Kevin Kramer, Howard Scott, James Demuth
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 2 | October 2014 | Pages 349-357
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-789
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A parameter study of a proposed inertial fusion energy chamber is performed. A baseline case of a 6-m-radius chamber filled with 6 μg/cm3 of xenon is studied in detail. The maximum first-wall temperature is shown to be 1136 K with an overpressure of 5.83 &plus 10−3 MPa. A parameter sweep is conducted for the chamber by adjusting the first-wall radius from 4 to 14 m, changing the gas density and changing the fill gas from xenon to argon. The results set limits on the first-wall radius for different gases and densities. Analytic fits to simulation results allow their use in overall engine design trade-off studies.
