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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.
Gonzalo Farias, Sebastián Dormido-Canto, Jesús Vega, Ignacio Pastor, Matilde Santos
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 20-25
Selected Paper from Seventh Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2012 (Part 3) | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-477
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Stray light is the main source of noise on the Thomson scattering diagnostic images of the TJ-II stellarator. The diagnostic provides temperature and density profiles of the plasma. A charge-coupled-device camera acquires images that are disturbed by noise, which, in some cases, can produce unreliable profiles. In this paper we describe three different approaches to reduce or mitigate the stray light on these images: exhaustive detection, extraction of regions with connected components, and extraction of regions with the approach of region growing. The performance of the two most interesting techniques is evaluated by a validation process. This process quantifies the noise eliminated by each method.
