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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.
E. Tsakadze, H. Bindslev, S. B. Korsholm, A. W. Larsen, F. Meo, P. K. Michelsen, S. Michelsen, A. H. Nielsen, S. Nimb, B. Lauritzen, E. Nonbol, N. Dubois
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 69-76
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1654
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The proposed fast ion collective Thomson scattering (CTS) diagnostic system for ITER provides the unique capability of measuring the temporally and spatially resolved velocity distribution of the confined fast ions and fusion alpha particles in a burning ITER plasma. The present paper describes the status of the iteration toward the detailed design of the ITER fast ion CTS diagnostic and explains in detail a number of essential considerations and challenges.The diagnostic consists of two separate receiving systems. One system measures the fast ion velocity component in the direction near perpendicular, and the other measures the component near parallel to the magnetic field. Each system has a high-power probe beam at an operating frequency of 60 GHz and a receiver unit. In order to prevent neutron damage to moveable parts, the geometry of the probes and receivers is fixed. An array of receivers in each receiving unit ensures simultaneous measurements in multiple scattering volumes. The latter receiving system (resolving the parallel component) is located on the high field side (HFS) of the plasma, and this constitutes a significant challenge. This HFS receiving unit has been central in the studies, and new HFS receiver mock-up measurements are presented as well as neutron flux calculations of the influence of the increased slot height.
