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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.
S. Sakakibara, K. Y. Watanabe, S. Ohdachi, Y. Narushima, K. Toi, K. Tanaka, K. Narihara, K. Ida, T. Tokuzawa, K. Kawahata, H. Yamada, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 176-185
Chapter 4. MHD | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10804
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper reviews progress in the study of pressure-driven interchange stability in the Large Helical Device (LHD) for 10 years. When the plasma approaches the boundary of ideal interchange mode, a strong magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) mode appears, leading to a distortion of pressure profile, although no major disruption is caused. The experiments for investigating magnetic shear effects in the magnetic hill configuration indicate that the reduction of magnetic shear leads to a minor collapse due to an excitation of low-order MHD mode. In the high-beta regime of more than 4%, MHD modes excited in the periphery with magnetic hill are observed to dominate, and it was found that the amplitude depends on the magnetic Reynolds number as well as the pressure gradient, which is qualitatively consistent with the prediction of resistive interchange mode. Also, experiments and theory for finding parameter dependence of the onset of the mode indicate that the onset is related to both the magnetic Reynolds number and the stability index of resistive interchange mode.
