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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Andrew J. Schmitt, J. W. Bates, S. P. Obenschain, S. T. Zalesak, D. E. Fyfe, R. Betti
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 377-383
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8930
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New approaches in target design have increased the possibility that useful fusion power can be generated with sub-MJ lasers. We have performed many 1D and 2D simulations that examine the characteristics of target designs for sub-MJ lasers. These designs use the recently-proposed shock-ignition target scheme, which utilizes a separate high-intensity pulse to induce ignition. A promising feature of these designs is their significantly higher gains at lower energies (one dimensional (1D) gain ~ 100 at Elaser ~ 250kJ) than can be expected for the conventional central ignition scheme. The results of these simulations are shown and we discuss the implications for target fabrication and laser design. Of particular interest are the constraints on the target and laser from asymmetries due to target imperfections and laser imprint.
