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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. R. Paguio, J. F. Hund, B. E. Blue, D. G. Schroen, K. M. Saito, C. A. Frederick, R. J. Strauser, K. Quan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 484-489
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A7431
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Single and double sapphire spheres have been precisely suspended in 300 mg/cm3 RF aerogels without a supporting stalk by modifying parameters such as gelation time and stability of the aerogel precursor solution and use of a vacuum holder for the sphere placement. A process for fabricating a single-sphere target was also developed using a spider silk support (approximately) 100 times thinner than the earlier work on similar targets. Characterization of the ball placement and the aerogel was done by radiography. Data from the characterization of these targets showed that the ball was accurately placed and the aerogel matrix was not significantly altered.
