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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.
T. Tokuzawa, K. Kawahata, Y. Nagayama, S. Inagaki, P. C. De Vries, A. Mase, Y. Kogi, Y. Yokota, H. Hojo, K. Tanaka, A. Ejiri, R. O. Pavlichenko, S. Yamaguchi, T. Yoshinaga, D. Kuwahara, Z. Shi, H. Tsuchiya, Y. Ito, S. Hirokura, S. Sudo, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 364-374
Chapter 8. Diagnostics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10822
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several types of microwave diagnostics, in the category of electron cyclotron emission (ECE) spectroscopy and reflectometry, have been developed on the Large Helical Device (LHD). Since LHD has a complicated magnetic configuration, the polarization effects have been studied for optimization of the microwave passive and active diagnostics. It was found that if the density is sufficiently high, the effect of mode conversion is negligible and the local polarization angle can be estimated as the angle at the plasma boundary. Three types of ECE spectroscopy, which are the heterodyne radiometer, the Michelson spectrometer, and the grating polychromator, have been optimized and operated routinely in order to measure radial profiles of electron temperature and its fluctuations in the frequency range 50 to 500 GHz. Several types of microwave reflectometers have also been utilized for measurements of the electron density profile and fluctuations. Two ultrashort pulsed radar reflectometers for density profile measurements, a V-band frequency-hopping reflectometer for density fluctuation profile measurements, and a fixed-frequency three-channel homodyne reflectometer for the interlock system of the neutral beam injection have been routinely operated. Also, an advanced diagnostic, which uses an imaging technique, has been developed to study the two- or three-dimensional structure of temperature and density fluctuations.
