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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.
George A. Kyrala, Matthew M. Balkey, Cris W. Barnes, Steven H. Batha, Cindy R. Christensen, James A. Cobble, James Fincke, Paul Keiter, Nicholas Lanier, Dennis Paisley, Michael Sorem, Damian Swift, Jonathan Workman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 286-295
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A463
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Targets are used for a variety of purposes, but ultimately we use them to validate codes that help us predict and understand new phenomena or effects. The sophistication and complexity of High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) targets has increased in to match the advances made in modeling complex phenomena. The targets have changed from simple hohlraums, spherical geometries, and planar foils, to 3-dimensional geometries that require precision in construction, alignment, and metrology. Furthermore, material properties, such as surface morphologies and volume texture, have significant impact on the behavior of the targets and must be measured and controlled. In the following we will discuss how experimental physicists view targets and the influence that target construction has on interpreting the experimental results. We review a representative sampling of targets fabricated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory that are used in different experiments in support of ICF and HEDP.