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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. W. Petzoldt, D. T. Goodin, E. Valmianski, L. C. Carlson, J. Stromsoe, R. K. Friend, J. Hares
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 417-421
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-25
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Various methods for accelerating targets to be injected into an Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) power plant have been considered such as gas gun, rail gun and electromagnetic induction. One method that could also be used for direct drive targets is electrostatic acceleration.We have been using electrostatic steering to improve target placement accuracy. We optically track the motion of a charged target, and feed back appropriate steering voltage to four steering electrodes. We have also completed fabrication and begun testing of an electrostatic accelerator that advances the electric field each time the charged target passes one of the 96 accelerating electrodes. Many of the accelerating electrodes are segmented to allow transverse position correction based on transverse position measurements during the acceleration process. Calculations indicate that this "first step" accelerator will achieve 10-15 m/s target velocity in 0.9 m with ±4 kV accelerating voltage. Updated target steering results as well as the accelerator design, fabrication, and early experimental results are presented.
