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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. Isobe, K. Nagaoka, Y. Yoshimura, T. Minami, T. Akiyama, C. Suzuki, S. Nishimura, K. Nakamura, A. Shimizu, C. Takahashi, K. Toi, K. Matsuoka, S. Okamura, CHS Team, H. Matsushita, S. Murakami
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 229-235
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1240
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of experiments to attain high stored energy and density in the Compact Helical System (CHS) are reported. The experiments have been carried out under the maximum neutral beam heating power and highest magnetic field strength of the CHS. With the help of the reheat mode, we have so far reached a stored energy of 9.4 kJ and a density limit expressed as nc = 0.65(PabsBt /Vp)0.5 for the CHS. In the high-density regime, the confinement of CHS plasma is limited by radiation collapse. A multichannel H light detector system shows an asymmetric feature in the poloidal cross section and indicates that confinement degradation in the high-density regime begins at the inboard side where the CHS plasma is close to the vacuum vessel wall.
