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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.
K. Shinohara, M. Sato, H. Kawashima, K. Tsuzuki, S. Suzuki, K. Urata, N. Isei, T. Tani, K. Kikuchi, T. Shibata, H. Kimura, Y. Miura, Y. Kusama, M. Yamamoto, JFT-2M Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 187-196
Technical Paper | JFT-2M Tokamak | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1094
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In JFT-2M, the toroidal magnetic field (TF) ripple was reduced by ferritic insert. Two kinds of ripple reduction were carried out. In the first case, ferritic steel was installed between the TF coil (TFC) and the vacuum vessel, just under the TFCs outside the vacuum vessel. In the second one, ferritic steel was installed inside the vacuum vessel covering almost the whole inside wall. The ripple was successfully reduced in both cases. The temperature increment on the first wall, which indicates the ripple-induced loss of fast ions, was measured by infrared television and was also reduced. The effect of the localized larger ripple was also investigated by attaching additional ferritic steel. A new version of the orbit-following Monte Carlo (OFMC) code was developed including the three-dimensional complex structure of the TF ripple and the nonaxisymmetric first-wall geometry. The experimental results and the new OFMC calculation were consistent.
