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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. Ida, S. Inagaki, M. Yoshinuma, N. Tamura, T. Morisaki, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 113-121
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10798
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radial profiles of the space potential are measured at the n/m = 1/1 magnetic island produced by external perturbation coils in the Large Helical Device (LHD). Both the temperature and space potential are flat inside the magnetic island, and the large radial electric field shear appears at the boundary of the magnetic island because the radial electric field is zero inside the magnetic island. However, when the width of the magnetic island becomes large, the space potential profile becomes peaked because of the convective flow along the magnetic flux surface inside the magnetic island around the O point. The appearance of the convective flow suggests that the perpendicular viscosity is significantly reduced inside the magnetic island. The perturbation transport study using the cold-pulse propagation is a useful tool to study the transport inside the magnetic island, where the temperature gradient is zero in the steady state. Inside the magnetic island, the cold-pulse propagates slowly from the boundary toward the center, and radial profiles of the delay time are peaked at the magnetic island. The large delay time (slow pulse propagation) indicates that the thermal diffusivity is even small inside the magnetic island. These experimental results indicate that the heat and momentum transport are significantly improved inside the magnetic island although the temperature and flow gradients are zero due to the lack of heat and momentum fluxes.