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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.
H. G. Reynolds, M. E. Schoff, M. P. Farrell, M. Gatu Johnson, R. M. Bionta, J. A. Frenje
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 365-371
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-235
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The magnetic recoil spectrometer uses a deuterated polyethylene polymer (CD2) foil to measure neutron yield in inertial confinement fusion experiments. Higher neutron yields in recent experiments have resulted in primary signal saturation in the detector CR-39 foils, necessitating the fabrication of thinner CD2 foils than established methods could provide. A novel method of fabricating deuterated polymer foils is described. The resulting foils are thinner, smoother, and more uniform in thickness than the foils produced by previous methods. These new foils have successfully been deployed at the National Ignition Facility, enabling higher neutron yield measurements than previous foils, with no primary signal saturation.