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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.
Dietmar Wagner, Dominik Schmid-Lorch, Jörg Stober, Hendrik Höhnle, Fritz Leuterer, Emanuele Poli, Francesco Monaco, Max Münich, Harald Schütz, ASDEX Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 2 | October 2010 | Pages 658-665
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10890
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The new electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) system at the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak allows for an adjustment of the polarization of the injected ECRH beam during plasma discharges. Three sniffer probes for millimeter wave stray radiation, with broad and polarization insensitive radiation characteristics, have been installed around the torus to monitor nonabsorbed radiation. The influence of varying ECRH-beam polarization on the detected stray radiation is studied. For perpendicular X2 heating the minimum detectable amount of wrong (O2-mode) polarization is found to be 5%. The system also allows full change of polarization from X2 to O2 mode, as it is useful for O2 heating above the X2-mode cutoff. These experiments show a high directivity of the stray radiation due to the toroidally inclined O2-mode injection.
