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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.
S. X. Zhao, Q. Li, W. J. Wang, C. Li, D. D. Zhang, R. Wei, S. G. Qin, Y. L. Shi, L. J. Peng, N. J. Pan, Y. Xu, G. H. Liu, T. J. Wang, D. M. Yao, G.-N. Luo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 4 | May 2015 | Pages 784-791
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-835
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A hot isostatic pressing (HIP) route has been developed by the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Advanced Technology & Materials Co., Ltd. for bonding W/Cu tiles to Ni-electroplated CuCrZr heat sinks. During high-heat-flux testing, in the initial stage, Cu/Ni interfacial debonding was observed. Careful analyses indicated that interfacial oxidation during encapsulation for HIP processing using tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding was the main cause of the limited fatigue lifetime. Copper oxides formed during the TIG encapsulation do not decompose during HIP at 600°C. As a result, weak bonding and even some microcracks were generated, and unfortunately these microcracks could not be detected by current industrial ultrasonic probes. An oxidation-free encapsulation technique, suitable for batch processing, has been developed to achieve a thermal fatigue lifetime of more than 1000 cycles at a heat load of 5 MW/m2 for the components.
