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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. Lu, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, D. L. Sadowski, K. G. Schoonover, F. Hegeler, P. M. Burns, J. D. Sethian
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 441-445
IFE Drivers and Chambers | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Active cooling of the transmission foil separating the vacuum diodes from the laser cell in the Electra KrF Laser is necessary to prevent its failure under repetitively pulsed (5Hz) operating conditions. This paper investigates the effectiveness of forced convection cooling using near-wall jets as a means of protecting the foil. Two different near-wall jet configurations are examined. The first one uses a planar, 1mm-thick, high-speed jet flowing parallel to the laser gas stream along the entire width of the hibachi foil structure. The second one uses small, 0.8mm-diameter circular jets positioned in staggered locations, 12.7mm apart, along the ~30cm height of each of the 24 hibachi rib spans with flow perpendicular to the laser gas stream. Bench-top experiments simulating a single 3.4cm×30cm foil span between two neighboring ribs have been conducted. For both jet configurations, experiments have been performed at different jet velocities and heat inputs. The goal of these experiments is to demonstrate quantitatively that near-wall jets can effectively cool the Electra hibachi foil under prototypical pulsed operating conditions without adverse impact on beam quality or laser efficiency. Preliminary tests with a full-size hibachi on Electra have shown this to be true.
