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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, C. R. Gibson, J. R. Hollaway, F. Espinosa-Loza
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 265-273
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-217
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the design of a flexure-based mount allowing adjustment in three rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs) through high-precision set-screw actuators. The requirements of the application called for small but controlled angular adjustments for mounting a cantilevered beam. The proposed design is based on an array of parallel beams to provide sufficiently high stiffness in the translational directions while allowing angular adjustment through the actuators. A simplified physical model in combination with standard beam theory was applied to estimate the deflection profile and maximum stresses in the beams. A finite element model was built to calculate the stresses and beam profiles for scenarios in which the flexure is simultaneously actuated in more than one DOF.
