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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.
Jorge J. Sanchez, Warren H. Giedt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 4 | December 2003 | Pages 811-819
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST44-811
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effects of natural convection in the tamping gas in a vertical hohlraum on the heat flow from a frozen layer of deuterium and tritium (D-T) on the inner surface of a target capsule is investigated numerically. The energy released from tritium decay within the capsule is transferred through the tamping gas to the cooling rings on each end of the hohlraum. The thickness of the frozen layer must be uniform. This means that the heat flow from it to the capsule must be spherically symmetric and that the temperature of the inner surface of the D-T layer will be uniform and in equilibrium with its vapor. The objective of this study was to determine the combination of boundary conditions and thin films for restricting convection in the tamping gas, which satisfy these requirements. With the capsule mounted between two thin plastic films, clockwise-flow convection cells form in the upper and lower gas regions. When this flow contacts the capsule, the temperature variation along the inner surface of the D-T layer was as great as 3 mK. This was reduced to 180 K by introducing thin films to isolate the capsule from the convection cells. Further reduction of this value to ~50 K was achieved by modifying the boundary conditions.
