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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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. Loomis, S. R. Greenfield, S. N. Luo, R. Johnson, T. Shimada, J. Cobble, A. Seifter, D. S. Montgomery
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 152-162
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4068
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Single crystals of beryllium were illuminated with nanosecond X-ray pulses generated from laser irradiated (~1.5 × 1014 W/cm2) gold targets. The characteristic gold M-band centered at 2.5 keV was measured by time-integrated transmission grating spectroscopy and a time-resolved (spectrally integrated) X-ray photodiode through beryllium targets of various thickness. Approximately decaying exponential temperature profiles were predicted to be induced in 100- and 160-m-thick single crystal targets producing nearly instant surface motion as measured by free surface velocity interferometry. This temperature profile gave rise to free surface (opposite to drive laser surface) velocity histories in a c-axis single crystal and a (10[overbar]10) single crystal in which large initial acceleration gave way to lower (ramped) acceleration due to the internal temperature gradient. A smooth rise to the peak velocity was then followed by a sharp release originating from the free surface nearest to the laser drive. Differences between the velocities in each of these regions were found between the two single crystals investigated, which were due to the thermal expansion properties as a function of direction (including plasticity). These results can be used to predict the behavior of preheated polycrystalline targets relevant to instability seeding in inertial confinement fusion ablators.
