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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.
K. Tanaka, K. Kawahata, T. Tokuzawa, T. Akiyama, M. Yokoyama, M. Shoji, C. A. Michael, L. N. Vyacheslavov, S. Murakami, A. Wakasa, A. Mishchenko, K. Muraoka, S. Okajima, H. Takenaga, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 70-90
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Particle confinement processes are studied in detail on the Large Helical Device (LHD). Diffusion coefficients (D) and convection velocities (V) are estimated from density modulation experiments. The magnetic configuration and collisionality are widely scanned in order to investigate parameter dependences of D and V. To study the effect of the magnetic configuration, magnetic axis positions (Rax) are scanned from 3.5 to 3.9 m. This scan changes the magnetic ripples quite significantly, enabling the effects of neoclassical properties on measured values to be widely elucidated. Dependences of electron temperature (Te) and helically trapped normalized collisionality are examined using the heating power scan of neutral beam injection. It was found that generally larger (or smaller) contributions of neoclassical transport in the core region, where normalized position < 0.7, resulted in more hollow (or peaked) density profiles. The larger neoclassical contribution was found to be situated at a more outwardly shifted Rax for the same Te and for higher Te or lower h* at each Rax. However, it is to be noted that Rax = 3.5 m shows different characteristics from these trends, that is, a more peaked density profile at higher Te or lower h*. The edge ( > 0.7) diffusion and convection are dominated by anomalous processes. Measured edge turbulence shows a possible linkage.