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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.
A. S. Ware, D. A. Spong, L. A. Berry, S. P. Hirshman, J. F. Lyon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 236-244
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work examines bootstrap current in quasi-symmetric stellarators with a focus on the impact of bootstrap current on the equilibrium properties of stellarator configurations. In the design of the Quasi-Poloidal Stellarator (QPS), a code was used to predict the bootstrap current based on a calculation in an asymptotically collisionless limit. This calculation is believed to be a good approximation of the bootstrap current for low-collisionality plasmas but is expected to be higher than the actual bootstrap current for more collisional plasmas. A fluid moments approach has been developed to self-consistently calculate viscosities and neoclassical transport coefficients. The viscosities and transport coefficients can be used to calculate the bootstrap current for arbitrary collisionality and magnetic geometry. The bootstrap current calculations from the two codes were done for low-density, electron cyclotron-heated (ECH) plasmas and high-density, ion cyclotron-heated (ICH) plasmas for a range of configurations, and provide a benchmark for the moments code and a test of the range of validity of the collisionless code. In the configurations examined here, namely, QPS, the National Compact Stellarator Experiment, the Helically Symmetric Experiment, the Large Helical Device, and the Wendelstein-7X Stellarator, the bootstrap currents predicted from the two codes agree qualitatively for both ICH and ECH profiles.
