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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. Vezinet, D. Mazon, D. Clayton, R. Guirlet, M. O'Mullane, D. Villegas
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 9-19
Selected Paper from Seventh Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2012 (Part 3) | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-475
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To obtain a fast estimation of the total impurity density distribution in a poloidal cross section from soft X-ray (SXR) measurements during quasi-stationary phases, the possibility that ionization equilibrium may have little influence on the emissivity profile of Ni and Fe in the core region of tokamak plasmas is investigated. Preliminary and encouraging results that support this assumption under certain conditions are found. A simplified approach aimed at computing a satisfactory estimation of the total density of a unique and identified impurity directly from an absolutely calibrated SXR tomographic inversion is implemented. An example of application to a previously and independently performed transport simulation of a Ni injection in Tore Supra is then given.
