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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.
J. Miyazawa, S. Masuzaki, R. Sakamoto, B. J. Peterson, N. Tamura, M. Goto, M. Kobayashi, M. Shoji, T. Akiyama, H. Yamada, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 200-207
Chapter 5. Divertor and Edge Physics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10807
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Easy access to the high-density regime without fatal disruptive phenomena is one of the important characteristics of the Large Helical Device (LHD). The operational density is considerably higher than the Greenwald density limit for tokamak plasmas. The density limit in LHD is reached when the edge density at the last closed flux surface exceeds a value approximately equivalent to the Sudo density limit that increases with the square root of the heating power. Extremely high central density of >1 × 1021 m-3 is achievable with a peaked density profile, as long as the edge density is kept lower than the Sudo limit. Furthermore, the central heating power must be larger than the radiation loss in the core region to avoid the "cold-core" phenomenon. As for the plasma edge, complete detachment takes place when the edge density exceeds the limit. Then, reattachment/Serpens mode/radiative collapse will follow, depending on the recycling condition.
