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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.
H. K. Chiu, S. Noraky, R. M. Hong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1051-1055
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering and Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST52-1051
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Water flow calorimetry is utilized at DIII-D to quantify injected neutral beam power. As part of the system upgrades for the past year, the old CAMAC-based telemetry system for the WFC diagnostic was replaced by a fiber optic Ethernet-based telemetry system. The difficulty to obtain replacement CAMAC hardware and the prospect of lower noise and spurious signal sensitivity motivated the move to fiber optic Ethernet-based telemetry. The new system was installed and tested during the 2006 physics campaign startup phase. Both the CAMAC-based system and the new Ethernet-based system were used to acquire data from one common neutral beam ion source in the current year. System performance improvements are presented.
