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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.
P. Platania, C. Sozzi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 77-87
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1655
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) and electron cyclotron current drive systems in fusion-grade devices meet the severe requirements (in terms of high power handling capability, extended steering range, and room availability) that guide the design of complex multiple-mirror quasi-optical launchers. A valuable step in this process is a beam-pattern calculation in vacuum including relevant electromagnetic effects not easily included in analytical evaluations. In fact, the analytical approach is a means to study the design layout at a first order and is able to derive the relevant quantities as a function of the steering angle and of the beam path in a form suitable to interface with most of the currently available beam-tracing codes. On the other hand, electromagnetic calculations using physical optics tools provide a complete description of the resulting full beam pattern, including the effects of aberration, beam truncation, thermal deformation of the mirrors, and the surrounding structures. Moreover, numerical calculation with reliable and benchmarked codes is a very efficient way to test subsequent updates of a given launcher model, once the basic geometry has been implemented. In this paper, we discuss in particular the application of the GRASP® code to the case of the remote steering option for the ITER ECRH upper launcher.
