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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.
D. A. Spong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 343-351
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1255
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent stellarator optimization efforts have targeted transport measures such as quasi-symmetry, effective ripple, and alignment of particle guiding center orbits with flux surfaces. This has resulted in significant reductions in neoclassical losses so that, at least for near-term experiments, the neoclassical transport of particles and energy can be made small compared to anomalous transport. However, momentum transport properties within magnetic flux surfaces provide an additional dimension for characterizing optimized stellarators. The momentum and flow damping features of optimized stellarators can vary widely, depending on their magnetic structure, ranging from systems with near-tokamak-like properties where toroidal flows dominate to those in which poloidal flows dominate and toroidal flows are suppressed. A set of tools has been developed for self-consistently evaluating the flow characteristics of different stellarators. Application of this model to existing and planned devices indicates that plasma flow properties vary significantly. Comparisons across devices can aid in unfolding the interplay between anomalous and neoclassical damping effects as well as the impact of momentum transport properties on related plasma phenomena such as turbulence suppression, shielding of resonant magnetic error fields, and impurity transport.