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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.
K.-J. Boehm, N. Hash, D. Barker, T. Döppner, M. P. Farrell, P. Fitzsimmons, D. Kaczala, D. Kraus, B. Maranville, M. Mauldin, P. Neumayer, K. Segraves
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 324-331
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reconciling the experimental and system requirements during the development of a new target system is one of the most challenging tasks in the design and engineering of targets used in the National Ignition Facility.
Targets for the GigaBar 3 campaign were meant to allow the detection of extremely weak Thomson scattering from matter at extreme densities in the face of very bright backlighter and laser entry hole plasma emissions. The problem was to shield the detector sufficiently while maintaining beamline and view clearances, and observing target mass restrictions.
A new construction process, based on a rapid prototype frame structure, was used to develop this target. Details of the design process for these targets are described, and lessons from this development for production and target assembly teams are discussed.
