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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
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.
R. E. Nygren
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 549-553
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - First Wall, Blanket, and Shield | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-8
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Investigations of designs with a flowing free-surface molten salt as a first wall in the Advanced Power Extraction (APEX) Program led to questions concerning the liquidus temperature and solidification processes for the [1:1:1] composition in the LiF, BeF2 and NaF system. Sandia experiments, reported in this conference, showed a liquidus temperature near 425°C for the [1:1:1] composition. We also identified other compositions that showed congruent (eutectic) solidification and had sufficiently low melting temperatures (~305-320°C) to be useful in this application. Further characterization of these materials is necessary to evaluate their potential. This paper summarizes a 3-D finite element analysis of the experiment that evaluates thermal gradients in the salt pool and crucible, reproduces the "thermal plateau" associated with the isothermal freezing of a eutectic, and compares the calculated temperatures with readings from the three thermocouples in the experiment.
