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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Yuji Moriyama, Tomoaki Kunugi, Takehiko Yokomine, Zensaku Kawara, Takayoshi Norimatsu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 392-396
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-972
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A laser fusion reactor needs an optical mirror in its final optical system. This optical mirror is exposed to the neutron produced with fusion reaction. It is pointed out that the exposure to neutron will produce hydrogen gas in the mirror and cause swelling deformation of mirror. To avoid this swelling of mirror, a liquid-metal mirror is promising. High energy laser shots on the liquid mirror will cause the surface wave. These waves must be damped to under 1/10 of the laser wavelength in 250 ms or less. In this study, the hydrodynamic behavior of the liquid surface was investigated by experiment with water as surrogate liquid, the computational evaluation for the wave propagation with the MARS (Multi-interface Advection and Reconstruction Solver, 2001) was carried out, and the design window for the optical mirror based on the water experiment was discussed.
