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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.
Y. Takeiri, O. Kaneko, K. Tsumori, M. Osakabe, K. Ikeda, K. Nagaoka, H. Nakano, E. Asano, T. Kondo, M. Sato, M. Shibuya, S. Komada, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 482-488
Chapter 9. Neutral Beam Interaction | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10834
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-power negative and positive ion-based neutral beam injectors (NBIs) are operated with high reliability in the Large Helical Device (LHD). The total injection power is >20 MW, and such high-power beams are available every 3 min. The high performance of the LHD NBI system has extended the LHD parameter regime to levels equivalent to those obtained in large tokamaks. Three negative NBIs inject a total power of 16 MW with an energy of 180 keV, which is the world's highest power from a negative NBI system (H-), and one positive NBI (H+) injects 7 MW at 40 keV. The injection duration can be extended beyond 1 min with reduced power from the negative and positive NBIs, and long-pulse plasmas are successfully sustained with the NBIs. The structure and performance of the LHD NBI system is reviewed.
