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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.
M. Yamamoto, T. Shibata, K. Tsuzuki, M. Sato, H. Kimura, F. Okano, H. Kawashima, S. Suzuki, K. Shinohara, JFT-2M Group, K. Urata
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 241-248
Technical Paper | JFT-2M Tokamak | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1098
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The JFT-2M tokamak has been modified three times during the Advanced Material Tokamak EXperiment (AMTEX) program to investigate the compatibility of the low-activation ferritic steel F82H with tokamak plasmas as structural material for future reactors. The ferritic steel plates/wall were installed inside and/or outside of the vacuum vessel to reduce the ripple of the toroidal magnetic field step by step through three modifications. This paper focuses on engineering aspects of these modifications: electromagnetic analysis to find a suitable way to attach these plates, installation procedure to keep small tolerances, and a three-dimensional magnetic field measurement device used to obtain information of the actual shape of the vacuum vessel used as a standard installation surface. To maintain good surface conditions of the ferritic steel plates/wall that rust easily, careful treatment was executed before the installation. To reduce oxygen impurities further, a boronization system with trimethyl boron, which is safe and easy to operate, was developed.
