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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
B. H. Mills, B. Zhao, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, M. Yoda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 541-545
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-116
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new helium (He) loop was used to study the helium-cooled modular divertor with multiple jets (HEMJ) at incident heat fluxes q″ ≤ 6.6 MW/m2 as part of the joint US-Japan effort on plasma-facing components evaluation by tritium plasma, heat, and neutron irradiation experiments (PHENIX). These studies were performed at prototypical pressures of 10 MPa and inlet temperatures ranging from 30 °C to 300 °C. The effect of varying the distance between the inner jets cartridge and the outer shell from 0.44 to 0.9 mm was also investigated.
The Nusselt number Nu results for two different tungsten-alloy test sections were in good agreement for q″ = 1.5−6.6 MW/m2. The experiments also suggest that the loss coefficient KL is essentially constant. These Nu and KL results were used to estimate the maximum heat flux q′′max that can be accommodated by the divertor under prototypical conditions and the coolant pumping power as a fraction of the incident thermal power β. The agreement over the broad range of experimental parameters studied suggests that these results at near-prototypical conditions can be extrapolated with reasonable confidence to the operating conditions expected for the HEMJ design.