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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.
Andrea Murari, Guido Vagliasindi, Eleonora Arena, Paolo Arena, Luigi Fortuna, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 2 | October 2010 | Pages 685-694
Selected Paper from the Sixth Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2010 (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10893
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In practically all fields of science, measurements are affected by noise, which can sometimes be modeled with an appropriate probability distribution function. The results of measurements are therefore known only with uncertainties that sometimes can be significant. In many cases the noise source is independent of the system to be studied and the quantities to be measured. In this paper, a numerical approach to handle statistical uncertainties, due to an independent noise source, in a fuzzy logic system is developed. Numerical analysis and various tests with a benchmark show how statistical error bars can be interpreted as an independent "axis of complexity" with respect to the fuzzy boundaries of the membership functions. The uncertainties in the inputs can be transferred to the output and handled separately from the system intrinsic fuzzyness. The main advantages of this independent treatment of the measurement errors are shown in the case of a binary classification task: the regime confinement identification in high-temperature tokamak plasmas. Significant improvements in the correct prediction rate have been achieved with respect to the classification performed without considering the error bars in the measurements.