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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.
K. Toi, F. Watanabe, S. Ohdachi, S. Morita, X. Gao, K. Narihara, S. Sakakibara, K. Tanaka, T. Tokuzawa, H. Urano, A. Weller, I. Yamada, L. Yan, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 61-69
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10794
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The L-H transition was observed in a unique helical divertor configuration where the core plasma is surrounded by ergodic layer, exhibiting rapid increase in edge electron density with sudden depression of H emission. Just after the transition, edge transport barrier (ETB) is formed at the plasma edge in the magnetic hill region, developing a steep density gradient. ETB region extends in ergodic layer beyond the last closed flux surface defined by the vacuum field. The transition occurs in relatively high beta plasmas when neutral beam absorbed power (Pabs) exceeds one to three times the ITER H-mode power threshold. Improvement of energy confinement time is modest (<1.1) for the ISS95 international stellarator scaling, whereas the particle confinement is clearly improved. The ETB width tends to increase with the increase in the toroidal beta at the ETB shoulder. ETB formation leads to destabilization of edge magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes with m/n = 2/3 or 1/2 (m and n being the poloidal and toroidal mode numbers) in ETB region of the inward-shifted configurations. Edge-localized modes (ELMs) are excited by these edge MHD modes through nonlinear evolution. Sometimes in outward-shifted plasmas, edge MHD modes are clearly suppressed in the H-phase and lead to an ELM-free H-mode. When large m/n = 1/1 resonant magnetic perturbations are applied to neutral beam injection-heated plasmas, the transition takes place at lower line-averaged electron density having the modest increase in electron temperature and small-amplitude ELMs.
