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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.
M. A. Ochando, F. Medina, B. Zurro, A. Baciero, K. J. McCarthy, M. A. Pedrosa, C. Hidalgo, E. Sánchez, J. Vega, A. B. Portas, L. M. Martínez-Fresno, HIBP Group, ECRH Group, NBI Group, TJ-II Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 313-319
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1252
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Understanding the origin of asymmetries, either in plasma flows reaching the divertor region or in plasma emissivity from the confined volume, is a question of great interest in magnetic confined plasma research.In the TJ-II stellarator, a set of bolometer systems distributed around the vacuum chamber has been installed to monitor up-down and in-out radiation asymmetries that are observed in transitions to different confinement regimes. Although plasma emissivity is a complex magnitude, a comparison of signals from twin detectors placed at selected positions may be of help to distinguish between the different causes of asymmetry. Moreover, this is a nonperturbing method that is especially appropriate when plasma wall clearance is small.