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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.
Karl Lackner, Hartmut Zohm
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 43-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-520
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tokamak equilibria with a snowflake divertor configuration are studied using a wire current model in toroidal geometry. A set of conditions for the formation of a snowflake divertor that can also be applied in full equilibrium calculations using a Grad-Shafranov solver is presented. It is shown that by taking into account the vertical force balance of the plasma, previously obtained results using a simple wire model have to be corrected. For a reactor-type device with coils far away from the plasma to accommodate the shielding requirements, the poloidal field coil currents become so high that they will represent a major technological challenge.
