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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
G. L. Kulcinski et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 607-614
Alternate Concepts & Magnets | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-283
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Gridded inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) devices use a 10-200 kV voltage difference to accelerate ions through a 0.1-10 mTorr background gas in a spherical or cylindrical geometry. The detailed investigation of a gridded IEC device using DD fuel has resulted in several surprises that have greatly altered our perception of how these systems operate. It was found that there are at least 4 major misconceptions that have been in place for over 15 years on how such IEC systems operate. These misconceptions range all the way from what energetic ion is causing the majority of fusions, to the energy and charge state of the reacting ions. Experimental results will illustrate some of the surprising reactions that are taking place in DD gridded system.
