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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.
H. H. Toudeshki, C. J. Martin, F. Najmabadi, J. P. Blanchard
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 535-540
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-112
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ARIES ACT-1 is a conceptual design for a commercial tokamak with aggressive physics and engineering. In the spirit of advanced engineering, the vacuum vessel design employed several novel concepts. It eliminates the use of water cooling in order to allow higher temperature operation and reduce the tritium inventory. It employs a low activation bainitic steel that eliminates the need for post-weld heat treatment. It includes sufficient volume to accommodate a full loss of coolant accident. Finally, it employs a novel mechanical design in order to withstand the operating stresses during normal operation, anticipated transients, and disruptions. In this paper, we present the most recent design for this component, update the stress analysis confirming the suitability of the design, and present results for disruption forces due to a plasma quench.
