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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
K. Hoshino, T. Yamamoto, H. Tamai, K. Ohasa, H. Kawashima, Y. Miura, T. Ogawa, T. Shoji, T. Shibata, K. Kikuchi, M. Sawahata, K. Takahashi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 139-167
Technical Paper | JFT-2M Tokamak | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1092
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We briefly present the experimental results obtained using the various heating and current drive systems, such as electron cyclotron heating, fast wave, lower hybrid wave, ion cyclotron range of frequency, neutral beam injection heating, or the external coil systems or the divertor bias system developed in JFT-2M from the viewpoint of the active control of the tokamak plasma. The features and design concepts of each system are described briefly, as we had to develop such systems to carry out the physical research. The experimental findings in plasma heating, current drive, and advanced plasma control in the JFT-2M tokamak contributed to the design and experiments in the larger tokamaks and to ITER.