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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.
L. J. Jiang, J. H. Campbell, Y. F. Lu, T. Bernat, N. Petta
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 295-309
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-222
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two-photon polymerization (2PP) offers an attractive option for direct writing micron- to millimeter-sized laser target components that support high-energy-density plasma physics research. 2PP was used to deterministically print a number of common targetlike structures including tubes, spatially periodic Rayleigh-Taylor–like surfaces, and low-density foams. The structures were printed using commercially available acrylic photoresins. The elemental compositions are reported for comparison with other polymers used for making target components. A number of foamlike structures ranging in size from tens to hundreds of microns and varying in density from 600 to 60 mg/cm3 were readily printed in times ranging from several seconds to a few hours depending on the size. In addition, direct printing was demonstrated to fabricate graded-density foam comprising 12 individual layers with a vertical density gradient of 600 to 80 mg/cm3. Control of shrinkage and deformation during development and subsequent drying remains a challenge for certain structures and a focus of ongoing research.
