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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.
Carlos E. Velasquez, Graiciany P. Barros, Claubia Pereira, Maria Auxiliadora F. Veloso, Antonella L. Costa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 625-629
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-949
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Different first wall material proposals based on tungsten alloy WNiFe, WLa2O3, W1.1TiC, W26Re, beryllium alloy S-B65, stainless steel SS316 and graphite have been studied in the last years. These materials must be capable of withstanding high temperature and neutron flux. Nevertheless, using hybrid systems, the first wall material choice could influence the criticality system due to the different properties of each material. To analyze this influence, two hybrid reactors were evaluated. The first one is a Tokamak based on magnetic confinement and the second one based on inertial confinement. Both systems contain a transmutation layer with reprocessed fuel spiked with thorium. The results showed the principal nuclides affected in the transmutation layer and the differences in the criticality due to neutron flux variations produced by the changes in the first wall material.
