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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.
N. Takeuchi, T. Seki, K. Saito, T. Watari, R. Kumazawa, T. Mutoh, Y. Torii, G. Nomura, A. Kato, F. Shimpo, Y. Takase, H. Kasahara, T. Taniguchi, H. Wada, N. Kasuya, K. Yamagishi, C. P. Moeller, M. Saigusa, Z. Yanping
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 3 | November 2005 | Pages 1267-1284
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel stacked combline antenna was fabricated for driving plasma current in order to control the rotational transform profile in the Large Helical Device. The antenna has ten elements facilitating excitation of fast-wave traveling in the toroidal direction.Each antenna element has an electrical length of a half-wavelength and is supported at the midpoint from the back plate by a metallic block. Such an antenna has two modes: even and odd. A mixed excitation of these modes will reduce the current drive efficiency. The electrical properties of this antenna were studied in an attempt to find ways of exciting a traveling wave of pure even mode. A matching section was used in combination and proved to be a good measure to improve the directionality over that of a bare combline antenna. It is confirmed in this paper that the fabricated real antenna has fairly good even-mode purity keeping the odd-mode intensity at a tolerable level. An antenna with insulating supports instead of the metallic supports is also examined, and it is found that even-mode purity is further improved. For practical uses, an entire system including impedance matching and power circulation is proposed, and sensitivity to a change in plasma loading is analyzed. Finally, the power-handling capability is discussed including estimations of plasma loading and driven current reaching an assertion of consistency with the experimental goal.