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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.
N. Tamura, S. Inagaki, T. Tokuzawa, C. Michael, K. Tanaka, K. Ida, T. Shimozuma, S. Kubo, K. Itoh, Y. Nagayama, K. Kawahata, S. Sudo, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 122-130
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10799
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The observation of a significant rise of the core electron temperature Te in response to edge cooling in a helical plasma was first made on the Large Helical Device (LHD). When the phenomenon takes place, the core electron heat flux is reduced abruptly without changing the thermodynamic values in the region of interest (core). Thus, the phenomenon observed in LHD can be equated to a "nonlocal transport phenomenon," observed so far only in tokamaks. The nonlocal transport phenomenon in LHD takes place in almost the same parametric domain (i.e., in a high-temperature and low-density regime) as in tokamaks. Meanwhile, various new aspects of the nonlocal transport phenomenon have been revealed by the LHD experiments; for example, (1) in LHD, the nonlocal transport phenomenon has been observed in net current-free plasmas sustained only by electron cyclotron heating. This experimental result can completely rule out the contribution of the toroidal plasma current as a reason for the nonlocal transport phenomenon. (2) It has been found that during the nonlocal transport phenomenon, there appears a strong correlation between core electron heat flux and edge Te gradient on a timescale shorter than the diffusion time and a spatial scale longer than the microturbulence correlation length. At that time, it was also found that an envelope of density fluctuations is modulated with a low frequency (2 kHz), which suggests the existence of a long-ranged turbulent structure in the plasma, where the nonlocal transport phenomenon can appear.
