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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
J. Kohagura, T. Cho, M. Hirata, T. Numakura, R. Minami, H. Watanabe, M. Yoshida, S. Nagashima, H. Ito, K. Yatsu, S. Miyoshi, T. Kondoh, J. Hori, T. Nishitani
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 271-273
Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963611
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Detailed plasma-physics investigations by the use of x-ray-tomography data supported by the fundamental theoretical studies of x-ray-detector responses enhance the importance of x-ray diagnostics for fusion-plasma analyses. However, degradation in responses of semiconductor x-ray detectors after fusion-produced neutron exposure still remains one of the most serious problems in recent fusion experiments even at this time. For the purpose of investigating and characterizing neutron effects on semiconductor x-ray detectors, detection characteristics of n-type silicon semiconductor detectors which are similar to those utilized for x-ray-tomography detectors in the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak, are studied by the use of synchrotron radiation from a 2.5-GeV positron storage ring at the Photon Factory. The fusion neutronics source (FNS) of Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute is employed as well-calibrated deuterium-tritium (D-T) neutron source with fluences from 1013 to 1015 neutrons/cm2 onto these semiconductor detectors. Degradation in x-ray responses with increasing neutron fluences has been reported; however, our recent detailed investigations of detector responses show nonlinear dependence as a function of the neutron fluence.
