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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.
M. F. Graswinckel, M. A. Van den Berg, W. A. Bongers, A. J. H. Donné, A. P. H. Goede, N. Lopes Cardozo, D. M. S. Ronden, A. G. A. Verhoeven
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 208-219
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1666
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A design is presented for the electron cyclotron (EC) heating and current drive system of the ITER upper port launchers based on the remote steering (RS) concept. In this concept the millimeter-wave beam is steered by a mirror that is located at the back end of the launcher waveguide. The RS concept has the advantage that the mirror steering mechanism can be situated in the secondary vacuum of the ITER machine where neutron flux and beryllium and tritium contamination is reduced. This allows simpler maintenance relative to a system with a plasma-facing steering mechanism. The optimization is carried out on the quasi-optical elements of the system, including the mirror shapes and positions. The design is assessed for its effectiveness in stabilizing the neoclassical tearing mode (NTM) over a wide range of ITER reference scenarios. The stabilization performance is quantified in terms of the parameter ntm, expressing the ratio between the peak EC wave-driven current density and the bootstrap current density, which parameter should exceed 1.2. The performance is also evaluated in terms of beam-focusing properties and power loading on the mirrors, and an empirical relation between beam size and ntm has been established. The performance achieved meets the requirements for NTM stabilization in all but one of the ITER reference scenarios.
