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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.
Junichi Miyazawa, Suguru Masuzaki, Hiroshi Yamada, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Byron Jay Peterson, Mamoru Shoji, Nobuyoshi Ohyabu, Akio Komori, Osamu Motojima, LHD Experimental Group, Peter Grigull, Yuehe Feng, Kent McCormick, Francesco Sardei, Yuri Igitkhanov, W7-AS Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 192-200
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1235
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Self-sustained detachment, named the Serpens mode (Self-regulated plasma edge 'neath the last closed flux surface), has been observed in the Large Helical Device (LHD), which is equipped with an intrinsic open helical divertor, in spite of the low divertor neutral pressure of order 10-3 Pa. Other states of detachment are also observed; one is transient partial detachment, observed only in the gas puff port during massive gas puffing, and another is complete detachment, which takes place when the hot plasma boundary shrinks below the last closed flux surface. The Serpens mode is categorized as a subset of complete detachment, but with large fluctuations in the divertor flux and H signal, which result from a rotating radiation belt called the serpent. In this paper, these are compared with experimental observations of partial detachment and multifaceted asymmetric radiation from the edge (Marfe) in a modular stellarator, Wendelstein 7-AS (W7-AS). There are many similarities between transient partial detachment in LHD and partial detachment in W7-AS and, especially, between the Serpens mode in LHD and Marfe in W7-AS.
