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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.
H. Funaba, K. Y. Watanabe, S. Sakakibara, S. Murakami, I. Yamada, K. Narihara, K. Tanaka, T. Tokuzawa, M. Osakabe, Y. Narushima, M. Yokoyama, S. Ohdachi, Y. Takeiri, H. Yamada, K. Kawahata, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 141-149
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10801
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The magnetic configuration of the Large Helical Device (LHD) changes with the increment in beta. To distinguish between the beta effect and the configuration effect on the gradual degradation of the global confinement property in the high-beta LHD plasmas, the local transport characteristics are studied by considering the change in the major radius of the magnetic flux surface with the beta value. A model transport coefficient that has the same nondimensional parameter dependence as the international stellarator scaling 2004 (ISS04) is introduced and used as the reference. The dependence of the local transport characteristics in high-beta plasmas on the major radial position of a geometric center of the magnetic flux surface is compared with that in low-beta plasmas. The dependence of the local transport in the peripheral region is correlated more with beta itself than the magnetic configuration effect, whereas the core transport appears to be correlated more with the configuration effect. The comparison of the experimental transport coefficients and the calculation results shows that the resistive pressure gradient-driven turbulence can be considered as one of the causes of this degradation.
