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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.
K. Hoshino, T. Suzuki, A. Isayama, S. Ide, H. Takenaga, H. Kubo, T. Fujita, Y. Kamada, T. Fujii, T. Tsuda, JT-60 Team, K. Ida, S. Inagaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 114-129
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1659
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The application of the electron cyclotron heating (ECH) and electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) to the JT-60U tokamak started in 1999. Because the power deposition by the electron cyclotron wave is very localized and controllable, the application of ECH/ECCD has been very attractive for the following recent studies in the JT-60U: (a) the extension of plasma performance toward high normalized beta (N), (b) high bootstrap current fraction, and (c) long-pulse operation (65 s). Plasma produced in the studies aiming at advanced steady tokamak is considered to be in a kind of "self-organized state" with external input power by joule heating plus additional heating. The internal transport barrier that develops by the additional heating enhances the local bootstrap current by steep pressure gradient, and then the modified plasma current profile establishes a different confining poloidal magnetic field configuration from the initial configuration. In such experimental research in the JT-60U, the ECH contributes as an active tool for the plasma control to study the physical mechanisms of high- magnetohydrodynamic instability, internal transport barrier, current hole, and so on. Results of the ECH/ECCD applications in the JT-60U are briefly reviewed.
