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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.
Neill Taylor et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 573-580
Fusion Technology Plenary | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST56-573
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to support the licensing application for the ITER facility at Cadarache, a preliminary safety case has been prepared and submitted to the French nuclear safety authorities. This paper provides an overview of technical aspects of this case, which is based on an evolution of the safety approach developed and applied in earlier phases of the ITER project.The basis of the safety of ITER derives from the fundamental safety characteristics of fusion. The potential radiological hazards that arise are related to the tritium fuel and material activated by neutrons. The confinement of these materials is therefore the principal safety function, and it is reliably provided by robust barriers inherent in the design together with filtering and detritiation as a secondary level of confinement provision.A Defense in Depth approach is taken to ensure that off-normal events are minimized in their frequency, and that the consequences of accidents, even though extremely unlikely, are limited. A comprehensive set of analyses of postulated event sequences provides the demonstration that the consequences of enveloping scenarios are well within acceptable limits, and that even for hypothetical events involving two or more independent failures, the public and environmental impacts remain limited. An ALARA approach is taken to minimizing occupational radiation exposure, as well as other potential impacts of normal operation such as routine releases.Other hazards arising from internal and external risks are also considered, with design provisions, for example the Tokamak building is built on seismic isolation pads to minimise the effect of an earthquake.