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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.
E. M. Giraldez, M. L. Hoppe Jr., D. E. Hoover, A. Q. L. Nguyen, N. G. Rice, A. M. Garcia, H. Huang, M. P. Mauldin, M. P. Farrell, A. Nikroo, V. Smalyuk
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 258-264
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hydrodynamic instability growth and its effects on capsule implosion performance are being studied at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Experimental results have shown that low-mode instabilities are the primary culprit for yield degradation. Ignition-type capsules with machined two-dimensional (2-D) sinusoidal defects were used to measure low-mode hydrodynamic instability growth in the acceleration phase of the capsule implosion. The capsules were imploded using ignition-relevant laser pulses and the ablation-front modulation growth was measured using X-ray radiography. The experimentally measured growth was in good agreement with simulations.
Fabrication of the preimposed 2-D sinusoidal defects of different wavelengths and amplitudes on the surfaces of ignition-type capsules was accomplished by General Atomics leading up to and during the Hydro-Growth Radiography campaign for the hydrodynamic instability growth experiments conducted at NIF between 2013 and 2014. The 2-D sinusoidal defects were imposed on ignition-type capsules by machining the surface of the capsule. The fabrication trials showed that there are six parameters that can affect the ripple form, wall thickness, and the extent of the pattern about the equator of the capsule: (1) knowing accurately the outer diameter of the capsule, (2) the roundness of the capsule (modal content), (3) the cutting tool alignment with respect to the surface of the capsule, (4) the radius and form of the cutting tool, (5) tool touch-off, and (6) the runout of the capsule center with respect to the axis of rotation of the lathe’s spindle. In this paper, we will describe the importance of these parameters on the machining of uniform 2-D sinusoidal defects.
