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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.
M. Kobayashi, Y. Feng, S. Morita, S. Masuzaki, N. Ezumi, T. Kobayashi, M. B. Chowdhuri, H. Yamada, T. Morisaki, N. Ohyabu, M. Goto, I. Yamada, K. Narihara, A. Komori, O. Motojima, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 220-231
Chapter 5. Divertor and Edge Physics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10809
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transport characteristics of the stochastic magnetic boundary of the Large Helical Device (LHD) are investigated, based on three-dimensional Monte-Carlo Braginskii-type fluid model code, EMC3, coupled with the kinetic neutral transport code EIRENE, in direct comparison with experimental observations for aspects of the relation between the magnetic topology and the resulting transport in terms of counter acting flux tube flows and impurity screening/transport. Divertor probe measurements show a rather weak divertor parameter dependence on upstream density in contrast to those of tokamaks at high-recycling regime. This is found to be due to the loss of parallel momentum via cross-field interaction between the stochastic flux tubes, where strong flow shear exists. The three-dimensional modeling predicts an impurity screening potential of the stochastic scrape-off layer (SOL) at high densities. The remnant island geometry affects the energy transport, which leads to suppression of the thermal forces by increasing cross-field energy flux across islands at high collisionality. The screening effect is most pronounced at the edge surface layers with a strong friction force exerted by the background plasma flow, where the flow toward divertor is enhanced due to the rich ionization source. Modeling results are compared to the edge carbon emission obtained in experiments, where a reasonable agreement on the density dependence is found, indicating the existence of the impurity screening mechanism in the stochastic SOL of LHD.