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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.
T. Andreeva, J. Kißlinger
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 258-261
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1243
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, which is currently under construction in Greifswald, Germany, is a five-period machine, and many of the planned operational plasma scenarios are characterized by the rotational transform /2 = 1 at the plasma boundary. Such magnetic configurations are particularly sensitive to the symmetry-breaking perturbations caused by fabrication and assembly errors, which can occur at different stages of the device construction. Analysis of nonplanar and planar winding packs (WPs) fabricated up to the present time has confirmed the existence of a systematical portion in the manufacturing deviations. The level of the magnetic field perturbation due to the statistical part in manufacturing errors can be expected to be of order 1 × 10-4 at the end of the WP production. Validation of different assembly steps and the resulting distortion of the current path will be done on the basis of the reference point measurements. The influence of the assembly errors and corresponding uncertainties on the magnetic field perturbation is estimated for some cases.
