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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. C. Bufford, C. S. Snow, K. Hattar
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 268-274
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273700
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigated the microstructural response of molybdenum, with and without prior exposure to gaseous deuterium, during helium irradiation and subsequent annealing. Ion irradiations and annealing experiments were performed in situ in a transmission electron microscope, enabling real time observation of the microstructural evolution. Cavities approximately 0.5 nm in diameter were formed in deuterium-exposed molybdenum at a fluence of 1.7 × 1015 helium cm−2, but did not grow appreciably after increasing the fluence by two orders of magnitude or after brief room temperature aging. Similar cavities were not apparent in pristine molybdenum. Larger cavities appeared in both samples during in situ annealing to 1063 K, without any clear differences between the two samples. The evolving cavity morphologies are discussed in terms of defect production, microstructure, and sample geometry.
