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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.
T. Sunn Pedersen, J. P. Kremer, R. G. Lefrancois, Q. Marksteiner, N. Pomphrey, W. Reiersen, F. Dahlgren, Xabier Sarasola
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 372-381
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1258
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We report on the results from initial testing and operation of the Columbia Nonneutral Torus, a new stellarator experiment constructed at Columbia University to study the confinement of nonneutral plasmas, electron-positron plasmas, and stellarator confinement in the presence of strong electrostatic fields. A new algorithm for automatic identification of good magnetic surfaces, island chains, and stochastic regions in Poincaré maps is also described. We present some of the details of the design of the interlocked in-vessel coils and the vacuum system and report on initial vacuum performance. Magnetic surface mapping and visualization results are also presented, confirming the existence of ultralow aspect ratio magnetic surfaces with excellent quality and good agreement with numerical calculations.
