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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Y. Yoshimura, S. Kubo, T. Shimozuma, H. Igami, H. Takahashi, S. Kobayashi, S. Ito, Y. Mizuno, Y. Takita, Y. Nakamura, K. Ohkubo, R. Ikeda, K. Ida, M. Yoshinuma, S. Sakakibara, T. Mutoh, K. Nagasaki, H. Idei, T. Notake, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 551-559
Chapter 11. Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST58-551
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Trials of steady-state operation (SSO) in the Large Helical Device (LHD) were started when a continuous wave (cw) gyrotron with the output power up to 0.2 MW was introduced to the electron cyclotron heating (ECH) system on LHD in 2003. During the first trial of SSO in the seventh LHD experimental campaign in 2004, severe temperature increase on the waveguide transmission line and, as a result, intense pressure increase in the evacuated waveguide occurred, which terminated the operation at 756 s. Additional pumping sections and cooling structures on the transmission line worked well, allowing a 3900-s sustainment of plasma with ne = 0.15 × 1019 m-3 and Te0 = 1.7 keV by 0.1 MW injection power in 2005. The improvement of the ECH system by introducing cw gyrotrons with higher power for further improvement of plasma performance in SSO is in progress.Investigations on electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) physics have been advanced a few years after the proof of ECCD in LHD. By obliquely injecting second-harmonic X-mode EC waves in toroidal direction, stable current up to 5.5 kA is driven, which was evaluated as a difference in plasma currents of the co- and counter-ECCD discharges with 0.1-MW EC wave power. It takes a few seconds for the driven current to saturate. Change in profile of rotational transform by ECCD and profile of driven current density are investigated by use of motional Stark effect measurement. Peaked and localized driven current profile at the plasma core region was confirmed for on-axis second-harmonic ECCD discharges.
