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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.
H. Kawashima, S. Sengoku, K. Uehara, H. Tamai, T. Shoji, H. Ogawa, T. Shibata, M. Yamamoto, Y. Miura, Y. Kusama, H. Kimura, H. Amemiya, Y. Sadamoto, Y. Nagashima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 168-186
Technical Paper | JFT-2M Tokamak | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1093
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental efforts on JFT-2M have been devoted to understanding the scrape-off-layer (SOL)/divertor plasmas and to investigating power and particle control by boundary plasma modification. Starting in 1985, an open divertor configuration was adopted for the first decade of the JFT-2M experiments. The characteristics of SOL/divertor plasmas such as in/out asymmetry for divertor plasmas, heat and particle diffusivities, and SOL current during an edge-localized-mode event were identified. The power and particle flux was successfully handled by active control methods such as local pumping, boundary plasma ergodization, divertor biasing, electron cyclotron wave edge heating, and fueling optimization. In 1995, to improve the power and particle control capability of the divertor, the JFT-2M divertor was modified to have a closed configuration, which demonstrated the baffling effects with its narrower divertor throat. A dense and cold divertor state (nediv = 4 × 1019 m-3 and Tediv = 4 eV), compatible with improved confinement modes (e.g., H-mode), was realized with strong gas puffing in a closed configuration. Edge plasma fluctuations related to the H-mode physics were identified by an electrostatic probe and magnetic measurements. These are reviewed in this paper.
