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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.
S. Masuzaki, M. Kobayashi, M. Tokitani, N. Ashikawa, T. Hino, Y. Yamauchi, Y. Nobuta, N. Yoshida, M. Miyamoto, R. Sakamoto, J. Miyazawa, T. Morisaki, N. Ohyabu, H. Yamada, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 321-330
Chapter 7. Plasmas-Wall Interactions | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10818
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A global particle balance study has been investigated in the Large Helical Device (LHD) in which the first wall and the divertor tiles are made of stainless steel (SUS-316L) and carbon, respectively. The carbon area is less than 10% of the stainless steel area. The analyzed discharges have been conducted under an intrinsic helical divertor (HD) or a local island divertor (LID). The HD is an open divertor at this stage, and the LID is a closed divertor equipped with a baffle structure and a pump system. In the HD configuration, fuel retention up to 75% of injected hydrogen was observed, and the retained hydrogen affected the plasma density control. On the other hand, almost all fueled hydrogen was evacuated by the pumps in the LID configuration. After each experimental campaign, detailed analyses of the in-vessel material probes (SUS-316L stainless steel) and a divertor tile exposed to various plasma discharges during each experimental campaign were conducted. The areal density of the retained hydrogen both in the material probes and the divertor tile was in the range 1021 to 1022 H/m2 , and it corresponded to the averaged areal density that was observed after an experimental day with high-density discharges.
