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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.
Ronald J. Ellis, Juergen Rapp
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 4 | November 2015 | Pages 750-757
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-909
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Plasma-material interaction is a major concern in fusion reactor design and analysis. The Material Plasma Exposure eXperiment (MPEX) will explore plasma-material interaction under fusion reactor plasma conditions. Samples with accumulated displacement damage (characterized by displacements per atom) produced by fast neutron irradiations in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be studied in the MPEX facility. This paper presents assessments of the calculated induced radioactivity and resulting radiation dose rates of a variety of potential fusion reactor plasma-facing materials, e.g., tungsten. The scientific code packages Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) and Standardized Computer Analyses for Licensing Evaluation (SCALE) were used to simulate irradiation of the samples in HFIR. This included the generation and depletion of nuclides in the material and the subsequent composition, activity levels, gamma radiation fields, and resultant dose rates as a function of cooling time. A challenge of the MPEX project is to minimize the radioactive inventory in the preparation of the samples and the sample dose rates for inclusion in the MPEX facility.
