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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
Yasufumi Tanaka, Heun Tae Lee, Yoshio Ueda, Masayoshi Nagata, Yusuke Kikuchi, Satoshi Suzuki, Yohji Seki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 433-437
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-109
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, surface damaged W monoblocks (melting and cracking) by a pulsed plasma gun and an e-beam devices were exposed to cyclic heat loads (simulating normal heat loads and slow transients) and pulsed heat loads (simulating ELMs) to observe the effects of surface damage on surface erosion and heat removal capability. Heat load tests simulating the normal heat load (10 MW/m2, 10 sec, 300 cycles) and the slow transient (~20 MW/m2, 10 sec, 300 cycles) were performed by the e-beam. The surface morphology changes after the heat load tests were observed using laser scanning microscopy and FE-SEM. After e-beam irradiation of ~20 MW/m2, the longitudinal cracks crossing over entire monoblocks appeared on the surfaces of all monoblocks. Recrystallization and additional crack formation were also observed on the surface. However, there was no significant change of heat removal capability. In the additional pulsed heat load test, the energy fluence of 0.042-0.30MJ/m2 was applied with pulse numbers of 103 and 104.The surface morphology changes after laser irradiation were observed using laser scanning microscope. After laser irradiation, the grain ejection occurred above a certain energy fluence (~25 % of melting threshold).
