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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
T. L. Rhodes, G. R. McKee, P. A. Politzer, D. W. Ross
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 1042-1050
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Achieving Reactor Quality Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1058
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Considerable research at DIII-D has been aimed at detailed comparisons of a variety of experimental fluctuation and turbulence measurements to turbulence simulations and theory. The goals of such comparisons are to improve the understanding of turbulence and transport as well as to test and provide feedback to the theory and simulations. Progress in this area will lead to confidence in the extrapolation of predictions to next-step fusion devices and, potentially, to improved control of transport. This paper summarizes some of the more recent and significant results of comparisons of experiment to theory and simulation that have been performed at DIII-D. These comparisons cover a range of plasma conditions (ohmic, L-mode, and impurity enhanced confinement), physical phenomena [transport, avalanches, zonal flows, and geodesic acoustic modes (GAMs)], and measurements (fluctuation levels, fluctuation spectra, radial correlation lengths, heat transport, and poloidal fluctuation velocity). Results reviewed here include comparisons between experimental turbulent radial correlation lengths and nonlinear turbulence simulations, measurements showing GAM activity (a type of zonal flow) similar to predictions, long-range or avalanche-type behavior with significant heat transport similar to that seen in nonlinear simulations, and reduction of turbulence with an enhancement of confinement during impurity injection similar to theory and simulation.