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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.
B. J. Le Garrec, G. L. Bourdet, V. Cardinali
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 369-374
High Average Power Laser and Other IFE R&D | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8929
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The real advantage of the laser driver as compared to other drivers is its ability to provide a high quality focal spot on target. Heat generation in solid-state media has always been recognized as a limiting feature because at high repetition rate, the quality of this focal spot depends on the beam wave-front distortions. It is not easy to design the driver baseline because there are too many different parameters to deal with. In this paper, we introduce two figures of merit that show that Yb doped ceramics (either garnets or sesquioxides) are promising laser materials opening new fields during the research phase to demonstrate ignition and fusion gain (including the fast ignitor concept). When driven at low temperature (cryogenic cooling), all of the operational features of the laser amplifier can be demonstrated at an aperture scale of only 10-15 cm.
