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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.
Matthew J. Bono, George Q. Langstaff, Octavio Cervantes, Craig M. Akaba, Steven R. Strodtbeck, Alex V. Hamza, Nick E. Teslich, Ronald J. Foreman, Johann P. Lotscher, Gregory W. Nyce, Ralph H. Page, Thomas R. Dittrich, Gail Glendinning
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 3 | April 2009 | Pages 318-324
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-3450
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Targets were fabricated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and were shot on the Omega laser to study the equation of state of nanoporous copper. The targets had a planar configuration and consisted of a 25-m-thick beryllium ablator, a 70-m-thick brominated-polystyrene preheat shield, and a 38-m-thick aluminum baseplate. A quartz window and a 30-m-thick nanoporous copper sample were bonded to the baseplate. The interface between the nanoporous copper and the aluminum baseplate was required to be as thin as possible so that it would not disturb the shock as it passed through the target. A process for bonding the nanoporous copper was developed that did not compact it or otherwise degrade its structure. An acceptable bond was achieved by sputtering a layer of indium-based solder onto the surface of the nanoporous copper and on the aluminum baseplate. The components were assembled and heated to melt the solder. The resulting solder interface had a thickness of ~1.5 m. The targets performed as expected in the experiments, and the interface between the nanoporous copper and the baseplate did not appear to significantly affect the shock as it passed through the target.
