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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.
Samuel G. Durbin II, Timothy P. Koehler, Jefferey J. R. Reperant, Minami Yoda, Said I. Abdel-Khalik, Dennis L. Sadowski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 1 | January 2004 | Pages 1-10
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A419
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A lattice consisting of arrays of stationary turbulent liquid sheets has been proposed for the HYLIFE-II inertial fusion energy reactor design to allow target injection and driver-beam propagation while protecting the first walls from damaging radiation. Interference between these sheets and the driver beams must be avoided, placing strict requirements on sheet free-surface fluctuations. Experiments were performed on nearly prototypical liquid sheets to determine the surface ripple and the absolute position of the free surface with respect to the nozzle exit. Planar laser-induced fluorescence was used to directly image the free surface at downstream distances up to 25 times the jet thickness (i.e., short dimension) at the nozzle exit for Reynolds numbers up to 130 000. Surface ripple, calculated using two different methods, was compared for two nozzle and two flow straightener designs. The surface ripple was found to be <0.05 (versus the current HYLIFE-II requirement of 0.07). The mean thickness of the sheet was found to decrease with increasing x. This work should be useful in establishing the minimum distance between neighboring jets to avoid interference with the driver beams and to provide quantitative geometric data for shielding and neutronics analyses of such systems.
