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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.
Y. Yoshimura, T. Akiyama, M. Isobe, A. Shimizu, C. Suzuki, C. Takahashi, K. Nagaoka, S. Nishimura, T. Minami, K. Matsuoka, S. Okamura, CHS Group, S. Kubo, T. Shimozuma, H. Igami, T. Notake, T. Mutoh
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 54-61
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1652
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Second-harmonic electron cyclotron (EC) current drive experiments have been performed in the Compact Helical System (CHS). The driven current changes its direction according to the change of the EC-wave beam direction in agreement with an expectation from the Fisch and Boozer theory in the case of low-field-side injection of EC waves. The EC-driven current varies as a function of the magnetic axis position of CHS plasmas. The cause of the variation was experimentally investigated by a magnetic field scan. Setting the second-harmonic resonance layer near the magnetic axis was favorable to maximize the total EC-driven current. The main cause of the dependence of the driven current on the magnetic axis position is attributed to the change of distribution of the magnetic field along the beam path due to the change of the beam direction to aim at the magnetic axis in the three-dimensional helical magnetic field of the CHS.
