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September 8–11, 2025
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.
Jon T. Van Lew, Alice Ying, Mohamed Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 288-294
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-937
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pebble-scale models of the interactions inside packed beds are critical for determining alterations to thermophysical properties in the wake of changes to the packed bed due to cracking, sintering, or creep-deformation of the ceramic pebbles. Simultaneously, the helium purge gas flow through the pebble bed can change; while not specifically playing a role as coolant, it does have an impact on the thermal transport in the volumetrically heated bed. We present numerical tools that are capable of resolving pebble-scale interactions coupled to bed-scale thermofluid flow. The new computational techniques are used to show that maximum temperatures in pebble beds do not increase drastically in spite of the significant amount of cracking induced in our numerical model. Furthermore a complete flow field of helium moving through densely packed spheres is modeled with the lattice-Boltzmann method to reveal the strong effect of slow-moving helium gas on flattening temperature profiles in pebble beds with nuclear heating.