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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
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.
D. Capelli, D. W. Schmidt, T. Cardenas, G. Rivera, R. B. Randolph, F. Fierro, E. C. Merritt, K. A. Flippo, F. W. Doss, J. L. Kline
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 316-323
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-229
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The shear experiments are designed to investigate the transition to turbulence of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability driven by counter-propagating shear flows. The shear targets for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) shear experiments consist of two hohlraums connected to both ends of a shock tube. The cylindrical shock tube is filled with two hemi-cylindrical CH foams separated by a metal tracer foil. On both ends, a thick gold half-moon–shaped D-plug is placed on opposite halves of the tube to create counter-propagating shock waves. The design is based on a smaller Omega shear target. While the basic NIF design has remained the same, details of the design have undergone several changes over the last 2 years and continue to evolve to improve the quality of the experimental results. Design changes include shock tube designs, tracer foil variations, transitioning to beryllium spool machining, and groove features inside of the tube. Details of how the targets are built including design, machining the parts, target assembly, and metrology are presented, as well as recent target developmental work to meet the needs of future experiments and to improve target assembly efficiency and accuracy.
