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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
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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.
Emily Clark, Arnold Lumsdaine, Jean Boscary, Kivanc Ekici, Jeffrey Harris, Dean McGinnis, Jeremy D. Lore, Alan Peacock, Jörg Tretter
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 635-639
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-954
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator experiment is scheduled to start operation in mid- 2015, and to move to steady-state operation in 2019. During this steady-state operation, certain plasma scenarios have been shown to produce heat fluxes that exceed the technological limits on the edges of the divertor target elements. The addition of a so-called scraper element (SE) in the ten divertor locations is being investigated in order to reduce the heat load on these divertor target edges. The ANSYS commercial multiphysics package is used to model the performance of the SE under predicted operational conditions. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling is performed to analyze the hydraulic and thermal characteristics of the water-cooled SE under thermal loading using the ANSYS CFX software. This multiphysics modeling is performed for the entire SE to ensure that the total pressure drop in the cooling water circuits, the increase in water temperature, and the peak temperature in the CFC all satisfy the design requirements. Because the contour of the SE surface must be machined to a sub-millimeter precision, it is important to determine the amount of thermal expansion experienced by the entire SE. The thermal-hydraulic results are imported into ANSYS Mechanical to perform the thermal-structural analysis. The thermal deformation of the SE is examined to confirm that the component’s position will remain within its operational limits.