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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.
I. Yamada, K. Narihara, H. Funaba, T. Minami, H. Hayashi, T. Kohmoto, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 345-351
Chapter 8. Diagnostics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Large Helical Device (LHD) Thomson scattering system measures electron temperature and density profiles of LHD plasmas along the LHD major radius at a horizontally elongated section. The LHD Thomson scattering system has an oblique backward-scattering configuration. The number of observation points and typical spatial resolution are 144 and 17 mm, respectively. The temporal sampling frequency is 10 to 100 Hz. Measurable temperature and density ranges are Te = 5 eV to 20 keV and ne 1018 m-3 , respectively. The LHD Thomson scattering system consists of several subsystems: laser system, light collection optics, polychromators, and data acquisition system. In the past decade, we have continued our efforts to improve the performance and reliability of the LHD Thomson scattering system through extension of measurable temperature and density ranges, Raman and Rayleigh calibrations for absolute density measurements, new laser beam positioning system, and plasma light monitor system for increasing data reliability. In this paper, we describe the recent progress of the LHD Thomson scattering system in detail.
