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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.
Kevin J. Kramer, Jeffery F. Latkowski, Ryan P. Abbott, John K. Boyd, Jeffrey J. Powers, Jeffrey E. Seifried
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 625-631
Laser Fusion-Fission Hybrid | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST18-8132
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is currently developing a hybrid fusion-fission nuclear energy system, called LIFE, to generate power and burn nuclear waste. We utilize inertial confinement fusion to drive a subcritical fission blanket surrounding the fusion chamber. It is composed of TRISO-based fuel cooled by the molten salt flibe. Low-yield (37.5 MJ) targets and a repetition rate of 13.3 Hz produce a 500 MW fusion source that is coupled to the subcritical blanket, which provides an additional gain of 4-8, depending on the fuel.In the present work, we describe the neutron transport and nuclear burnup analysis. We utilize standard analysis tools including, the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) transport code, ORIGEN2 and Monte burns to perform the nuclear design. These analyses focus primarily on a fuel composed of depleted uranium not requiring chemical reprocessing or enrichment. However, other fuels such as weapons grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium are also under consideration. In addition, we have developed a methodology using 6Li as a burnable poison to replace the tritium burned in the fusion targets and to maintain constant power over the lifetime of the engine. The results from depleted uranium analyses suggest up to 99% burnup of actinides is attainable while maintaining full power at 2GW for more than five decades.