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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.
B. Zhao, B. H. Mills, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, M. Yoda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 561-565
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-122
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Three-dimensional numerical simulations of a test section modeling a single module of the helium-cooled modular divertor with multiple jets (HEMJ) design were performed to complement experimental studies at nearly prototypical conditions as part of the joint US-Japan effort on plasma-facing components evaluation by tritium plasma, heat, and neutron irradiation experiments (PHENIX). The Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model gave numerical predictions of the cooled surface temperature that were in good agreement with experimental estimates from a new helium loop. The simulations showed that spatial variations in incident heat flux, at least in the form of a Gaussian function, had a negligible effect on cooled surface temperatures.
Our initial results indicate that the numerical predictions of the thermal performance of a single HEMJ module are in reasonable agreement with the experimental studies. The simulations do, however, predict slightly higher heat transfer coefficients (HTCs) than the experimental studies, presumably because they do not account for thermal losses. The HTC appears to be essentially independent of incident heat flux, suggesting that the model can be used to investigate parameters that cannot be determined experimentally in many cases, such as the local HTC and temperature distributions within the divertor pressure boundary, at prototypical conditions.