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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Y. Kawamata et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 491-495
Plasma Engineering - Fueling and Diagnostics | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST60-491
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The JT-60 operations were stopped in 2008 in order to be upgraded to a superconducting tokamak device, JT-60 Super Advanced (JT-60SA). The design activity of JT-60SA is going on under the ITER-BA project, and the discussion on the operational scenarios of JT-60SA has begun. On the basis of these situations, we have been on a developmental work for JT-60SA control system.The JT-60 real time control system is composed of a workstation and a VME-based real time controller using a VxWorks. The VxWorks is one of the most commonly used real-time OSs in the embedded system markets. However, the introduction cost is higher than that of other RTOSs.From a cost-effectiveness and a long-term stable supply viewpoint, we have chosen INtime running on Windows OS-based Personal Computer. INtime is able to add a real-time performance to a PC on which Windows is installed. Therefore, in JT-60 real time control system, some of the subsystems running on VxWorks have been replaced with a PC-based control system. In future development activity, we plan to adopt the PC-based controller with INtime as the standard of JT-60SA control system. In this report, the developmental status of JT-60SA control system will be described.