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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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August 2025
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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.
Y. K. M. Peng et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 957-964
Power Plants, Demo, and Next Steps | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9034
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The use of a fusion component testing facility to study and establish, during the ITER era, the remaining scientific and technical knowledge needed by fusion Demo is considered and described in this paper. This use aims to test components in an integrated fusion nuclear environment, for the first time, to discover and understand the underpinning physical properties, and to develop improved components for further testing, in a time-efficient manner. It requires a design with extensive modularization and remote handling of activated components, and flexible hot-cell laboratories. It further requires reliable plasma conditions to avoid disruptions and minimize their impact, and designs to reduce the divertor heat flux to the level of ITER design. As the plasma duration is extended through the planned ITER level (∼103 s) and beyond, physical properties with increasing time constants, progressively for ∼104 s, ∼105s, and ∼106 s, would become accessible for testing and R&D. The longest time constants of these are likely to be of the order of a week (∼106 s). Progressive stages of research operation are envisioned in deuterium, deuterium-tritium for the ITER duration, and deuterium-tritium with increasingly longer plasma durations. The fusion neutron fluence and operational duty factor anticipated for this "scientific exploration" phase of a component test facility are estimated to be up to 1 MW-yr/m2 and up to 10%, respectively.