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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.
Robert D. Day, Frank Fierro, Felix P. Garcia, Douglass J. Hatch, Randall B. Randolph, Patrick Reardon, Gerald Rivera
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 3 | April 2009 | Pages 301-307
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST55-3-301
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During the course of machining targets for various experiments, it sometimes becomes necessary to take fixtures or machines that are designed for one function and adapt them to another function. When adapting a machine or fixture is not adequate, it may be necessary to acquire a machine specifically designed to produce the component required. In addition to the above scenarios, the features of a component may dictate that multistep machining processes are necessary to produce the component. This paper discusses the machining of four components where adaptation, specialized machine design, or multistep processes were necessary to produce the components.
