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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.
S. Park, Y. S. Bae, J. H. Kim, H. Do, H. T. Kim, K. M. Kim, H. K. Kim, H. J. Kim, W. S. Han, H. L. Yang, J. G. Kwak, W. Namkung, M. H. Cho, H. Park, L. Delpech, J. Hillairet, R. Magne, G. T. Hoang, X. Litaudon, G. Wallace, S. Shiraiwa, R. Vieira, J. Doody, R. Parker
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 49-58
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-493
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 5-GHz steady-state lower hybrid (LH) current drive (LHCD) system is planned to support steady-state and advanced tokamak operation on the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) experiment. As an initial phase, a pulsed 5-GHz, 500-kW LHCD system has been installed in KSTAR for basic experimental studies of the LH coupling and flux saving in the plasma current ramp-up, prior to long-pulse noninductive operation in KSTAR. A Toshiba-made klystron developed in collaboration with Pohang University of Science and Technology in 2006 is utilized for the initial KSTAR LHCD system. The LH launcher is designed as a fully active waveguide grill type with a parallel refractive index n[parallel] value ranging from 1.8 to 4.3 and with high directivity. In the initial stage, the LH launcher consists of eight columns of four-way power splitters and two columns of dummy waveguides, one on each side. The operational n[parallel] value is fixed at 2.1 but can be adjusted by replacing waveguide components external to the vacuum vessel. Since the target operation pulse duration of the initial LHCD system is 2 s with an output power of 500 kW at the klystron window, the prototype klystron was recently successfully conditioned to a radio frequency power of 514 kW for a maximum pulse duration of 3 s using a matched dummy load (voltage standing wave ratio of 1.16:1). This paper presents the progress of the initial KSTAR LHCD system and the performance test results of the prototype klystron. The research plan aiming at steady-state LHCD operation in KSTAR is also described in this paper.