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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.
J. Miyazawa, H. Yamada, R. Sakamoto, H. Funaba, K. Y. Watanabe, S. Sakakibara, K. Ida, M. Goto, T. Morisaki, S. Murakami, S. Inagaki, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 29-37
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10790
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Global energy confinement in the Large Helical Device has been proved to be comparable to those of tokamaks in ELMy H-mode. It shows a gyro-Bohm-like property as seen in international stellarator scalings. This implies that the anomalous transport dominates the neoclassical transport. At least in the configurations with small helical ripples, no significant collisionality dependence predicted by the neoclassical theory has been observed. Confinement degradation compared with the international stellarator scalings often takes place in the plasmas with high peripheral density. In many cases, this is due to the shallow penetration of heating beams. Adding to this, deviation from gyro-Bohm can be caused by the emergence of a "weak temperature dependence" of the thermal diffusivity. It depends on the plasma parameters whether this weak temperature dependence deteriorates or improves the thermal transport. The central pressure that is also an important parameter for envisioning a fusion reactor is not necessarily proportional to the global confinement. The central pressure is insensitive to the variation of magnetic configuration that strongly affects the global confinement.