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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.
M. Kaneko, S. Kobayashi, Y. Suzuki, T. Mizuuchi, K. Nagasaki, H. Okada, Y. Nakamura, K. Hnatani, S. Murakami, K. Kondo, F. Sano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 428-433
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1265
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the Heliotron J device, the configuration effects on the particle confinement are studied experimentally with tangentially injected neutral beams and a charge-exchange (CX) neutral particle analyzer (NPA) system. The hydrogen neutral beam are co-injected into deuterium plasmas heated by electron cyclotron heating. The detected CX flux increases, as the CX-NPA is oriented to the beam-facing direction. The behavior of the CX flux is studied by changing one of the Fourier components in the magnetic field, the bumpiness component, B04/B00, from 0.01 to 0.15. Here, Bmn is the Fourier component of the magnetic field strength in the Boozer coordinates where the subscript m/n denotes poloidal/toroidal mode numbers. The dependence of the CX flux on the configurations and pitch angle, which represents the change of the loss cone shape predicted by noncollisional orbit calculation, is observed. The bulk deuterium temperature slightly increases with increasing the bumpiness component. The decay time of the CX flux just after the neutral beam is turned off becomes longer with increasing the bumpiness component. By comparison of observation and calculation of the Fokker-Planck equation, the loss time of fast ions in the high-bumpiness configuration is longer than that of the standard configuration in Heliotron J.
