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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. A. Koch, B. J. Kozioziemski, J. Salmonson, A. Chernov, L. J. Atherton, E. Dewald, N. Izumi, M. A. Johnson, S. Kucheyev, J. Lugten, E. Mapoles, J. D. Moody, J. W. Pipes, J. D. Sater, D. Stefanescu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 3 | April 2009 | Pages 244-252
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-3455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Deuterium-tritium (D-T) single-crystal ice layers in spherical shells often form with localized defects that we believe are vapor-etched grain boundary grooves built from dislocations and accommodating slight misorientations between contacting lattice regions. Ignition implosion target requirements limit the cross-sectional areas and total lengths of these grooves, and since they are often the dominant factor in determining layer surface quality, it is important that we be able to characterize their depths, widths, and lengths. We present a variety of ray-tracing and diffraction image modeling results that support our understanding of the profiles of the grooves, which is grounded in X-ray and optical imaging data. We also describe why these data are nevertheless insufficient to adequately determine whether or not a particular layer meets the groove requirements for ignition. We present accumulated data showing the distribution of groove depths, widths, and lengths from a number of layers, and we discuss how these data motivate the adoption of layer rejection criteria in order to ensure that layers that pass these criteria will almost certainly meet the groove requirements. We also describe future improvements that will provide more quantitative information about grooves in D-T ice layers.