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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
N. Yanagi, S. Imagawa, H. Sekiguchi, A. Ninomiya, K. Takahata, S. Hamaguchi, T. Obana, T. Mito, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 571-580
Chapter 12. Superconducting Magnet System | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10844
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performance of the superconducting helical coils of the Large Helical Device (LHD) during the past 12 cooling cycles is reviewed. The pair of helical coils are pool cooled by liquid helium and wound with aluminum-stabilized NbTi/Cu composite-type superconductors. Intensive efforts have been made to reliably carry out excitations, as more than 20 temporary normal transitions were observed. It was found that the minimum propagation current was about 10% lower than the nominal operation current. To improve the cryogenic stability, subcooled liquid helium has been supplied since 2006 using cold compressors, and the inlet temperature is lowered to be 3.2 K. The toroidal magnetic field has been raised by 5% and the plasma parameters are being enhanced. Pulse-height analysis is successfully applied on the balance voltage and acoustic emission signals to investigate the mechanical properties of the windings and their changes in years of operation. Short-duration normal transitions are automatically detected using a sophisticated monitoring system and careful operations are continued.
