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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
D. A. Humphreys, R. D. Deranian, J. R. Ferron, A. W. Hyatt, R. D. Johnson, R. R. Khayrutdinov, R. J. La Haye, J. A. Leuer, B. G. Penaflor, J. T. Scoville, M. L. Walker, A. S. Welander
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 1249-1263
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Technologies for Next-Step Devices | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1075
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The integrated plasma control approach provides a systematic method for designing plasma control algorithms with high reliability and for confirming their performance off-line prior to experimental implementation. This approach includes construction of plasma and system response models, validation of models against operating experiments, design of integrated controllers that operate in concert with one another as well as with supervisory modules, simulation of control action against off-line and actual machine control platforms, and iteration of the design-test loop to optimize performance. Using this approach, required levels of robustness to model uncertainties and off-normal events can be quantified and incorporated in the design process. The DIII-D digital plasma control system (PCS) enables application of this method by providing a flexible programming environment and an architecture for real-time parallel operation of a set of computers that executes the large set of control algorithms needed for exploration of the advanced tokamak regime. The present work describes the DIII-D PCS and the approach, benefits, and progress made in integrated plasma control as applied to the DIII-D tokamak, with implications for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor design and other next-generation tokamaks.