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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.
K. Ida, M. Yoshinuma, C. Suzuki, T. Kobuchi, K. Y. Watanabe, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 383-393
Chapter 8. Diagnostics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10824
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radial profiles of the rotational transform are measured with the motional Stark effect spectroscopy in the Large Helical Device. They are derived from the radial profiles of the polarization angle of the and components in the H line emitted from high-energy hydrogen atoms of beams with four sets of linear polarizers, spectrometers, and charge-coupled device detectors. Changes in the rotational transform due to the neutral beam current drive (NBCD) and the electron cyclotron current drive are measured. When NBCD is in the direction counter to the equivalent plasma current, the central rotational transform increases because of the inductive current while the edge rotational transform decreases, as is expected. Therefore, the magnetic shear becomes weak with NBCD in the counterdirection, whereas it becomes strong with NBCD in the codirection. NBCD that drives toroidal current, typically <10% of the equivalent toroidal current determined by the external current in the helical coils, can change the rotational transform and magnetic shear significantly enough to change magnetohydrodynamic stability.
