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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.
Kazuhisa Yuki, Makoto Kawamoto, Munehito Hattori, Koichi Suzuki, Ken-ichi Sunamoto, Akio Sagara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 715-719
Technical Note | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-115
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, in order to enhance heat transfer performance of helium gas flow for divertor cooling, high thermal conductivity porous media that are copper-particles-sintered ones are introduced as the referential porous media. In order to predict the heat transfer performance of He gas impinging jet flow with the porous medium, nitrogen gas is used as the simulant of helium gas in the pressure range of 0.1 MPa to 0.8 MPa. With the porous medium, the particle introduced is highly size-adjusted one of 1000 μm in diameter and the porosity is almost 30 %. The maximum heat transfer performance is evaluated by numerically simulating temperature field in a heat transfer block based on the measured temperature data. The experiments prove that the heat transfer coefficient of N2 gas impinging jet flow with the porous medium is much higher than that of common impinging jet flow without the porous medium from the view point of not only flow velocity but also pumping power.
