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August 2025
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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.
O. Kaneko, Y. Takeiri, K. Tsumori, M. Osakabe, K. Ikeda, K. Nagaoka, H. Nakano, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 497-503
Chapter 9. Neutral Beam Interaction | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10836
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A unique and reliable method of plasma initiation has been established in the Large Helical Device (LHD) by using neutral beam (NB) injection into vacuum. Since LHD is a superconducting machine, the confining magnetic field exists unrelated to plasma. Under these circumstances it is demonstrated that the NB can initiate plasma by itself. A small fraction of injected NB is ionized by collision with the background neutral gas and is confined by the magnetic field. Although these high-energy ions are lost quickly by charge exchange, they work as the energy source for ionizing the background neutral particles and heating the produced plasma. As a result, very thin but hot "seed" plasma is generated, which ionizes puffed gas and makes dense target plasma that is sufficient for NB absorption. This process is simulated numerically and the results agree well with the experimental observations for both absolute values and temporal behavior of plasma parameters. The method does not depend on magnetic field strength strongly, and plasma can be initiated at the magnetic field strength as low as 0.4 T, although standard field strength of LHD is 2.75 T. The progress of high-beta studies in LHD owes this plasma production method much.
