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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.
Brian J. Egle, John F. Santarius, Gerald L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1110-1113
Technical Paper | Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1646
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The performance of a new Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion device using a cylindrical anode and two different cathode geometries, spherical and cylindrical, was compared to an existing IEC device with two different sized configurations of spherical anodes and cathodes. Experimental data was generated at -30 to -150 kilovolts, 30 milliamps steady-state, and 0.3 Pascal of Deuterium (D) and/or Helium-3 (3He). The best neutron rate achieved by the new device in a D environment was 2.7 × 107 neutrons per second at 145 kV and 35 mA. In a D-3He environment, the best proton rate achieved was 2.0 × 107 protons per second at 130 kV and 30 mA. Both the D-D neutron rate and the D-3He proton rate were approximately 40% lower than the larger volume existing IEC device.
