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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.
Y. Nakao, M. Katsube, T. Ohmura, Y. Saito, T. Johzaki, K. Mima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 401-404
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8934
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The possibility of igniting D3He plasma in the fast-ignition, inertial confinement fusion scheme is discussed. Use of a small amount of DT fuel as an igniter is indispensable in order to mitigate the requirement on driver energy. Simulations have been made for a DT/D3He fuel compressed to 2000 ~ 4000 times the liquid density. The DT igniter is placed at the edge of the compressed fuel. The work shows that it is possible to obtain sufficient pellet gains (100) with realistic driver energy below 10 MJ. The essential roles of DT fusion neutron and nuclear elastic scattering are clarified. The possibility to reduce the amount of DT fuel is discussed.
