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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.
S. Nogami, K. Yamamoto, M. Fukuda, A. Hasegawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 601-606
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-927
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To improve the fatigue life assessment of the relatively thin wall structure of the fusion reactor blanket, the fatigue micro-crack initiation behavior of the F82H steel at room temperature was investigated. The micro-crack initiation life was approximately 20–30 % of the fatigue life. The crack initiation was observed at the prior austenitic grain boundary, the packet boundary, the block boundary, and the inside of the block structure. The majority was the transgranular crack initiation, which exceeded 90 % of the all. The effect of the irradiation damage (irradiation hardening) was only a shortening of the micro-crack initiation life. No change of the micro-crack initiation sites and their ratio were observed.
