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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.
T. P. Bernat, J. H. Campbell, N. Petta, I. Sakellari, S. Koo, J.-H. Yoo, C. Grigoropoulos
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 310-315
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-219
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hollow cylindrical tubes grown directly from flat glass substrates as well as spherical glow-discharge-polymer substrates were made using two-photon polymerization. The tube diameters were as small as 10-μm outer diameter and 4- to 5-μm inner diameter, and lengths were as long as 450 μm. Such structures could conceivably be used as fill tubes on inertial confinement fusion capsules. Two resin materials were examined, giving tubes with different flexibilities. One resin was an organic-inorganic hybrid silicon-zirconium sol gel, the second being Ormocomp, a commercially available ultraviolet-curable material. The strength of attachment of the zirconium-based sol gel tubes to their substrates was measured to be around 100 MPa. The times measured to remove uncured resins from high-aspect-ratio tubes during the development process were several hours.
