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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.
B. Plaum, G. Gantenbein, W. Kasparek, K. Schwörer, M. Grünert, H. Braune, V. Erckmann, F. Hollmann, L. Jonitz, H. Laqua, G. Michel, F. Noke, F. Purps, A. Bruschi, S. Cirant, F. Gandini, A. G. A. Verhoeven, ECRH Groups
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | July 2006 | Pages 1-14
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1216
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper reports the results of the high-power tests of a remote-steering-launcher mock-up at 140 GHz, which were performed at the electron cyclotron resonance heating installation for the future stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) at Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Greifswald. The mock-up test system consists of a 6.62-m-long square corrugated waveguide with a steerable optic at the entrance and various diagnostics at the exit of the waveguide. A straight launcher and a version with two integrated miter bends were investigated.The ohmic loss of the waveguide was measured via the temperature increase of the waveguide wall and was used to calibrate the calculated angular dependence of the total ohmic losses of the waveguide. Short-pulse radiation pattern measurements with thermographic recording show high beam quality and confirm the steering range of -12...12 deg. The version with two miter bends produces similar results but with an increased level of side lobes.Although the tests were performed under atmospheric pressure, no arcing was observed in the straight waveguide. In the version with the miter bends, however, arcing limited the power and pulse length.
