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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.
Hiroyuki Okada, Yuki Torii, Shinji Kobayashi, Masashi Kaneko, Jun Arakawa, Hiroki Kitagawa, Takashi Mutoh, Tohru Mizuuchi, Kazunobu Nagasaki, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Yuji Nakamura, Takashi Takemoto, Satoshi Yamamoto, Hajime Arimoto, Kiyoshi Hanatani, Katsumi Kondo, Fumimichi Sano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 287-293
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1248
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fast-ion formation and confinement experiment is performed using the ion cyclotron range of frequencies (ICRF) minority heating scheme in Heliotron J. In particular, the role of one of the Fourier components, the bumpiness, is an important issue for the design principle of the magnetic field of Heliotron J, where the particle confinement is controlled by the bumpiness. We study the dependence of the fast-ion confinement on the bumpiness using fast ions produced by the ICRF heating.High-energy ions are produced up to 10 keV by injecting an ICRF pulse into electron cyclotron heating target plasmas. Moreover, ions up to 36 keV are observed in the combination heating of ICRF and neutral beam injection (NBI), where the NBI energy is 28 keV. To clarify the role of the bumpy component for the high-energy ions, three configurations with various bumpy components are selected. The tail temperature is highest in the high bumpy case. It is considered that bumpy control is effective for the fast-ion confinement in Heliotron J. An increase of the bulk-ion temperature from 0.2 to 0.4 keV is observed during the ICRF pulse. The heating efficiency also depends on the bumpy component.
