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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.
T. Imai et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 8-15
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-1T29
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
GAMMA 10/PDX project is the development of the mirror devices to aim the fusion-reactor relevant research using the potential control and the end loss as the particle and heat fluxes for transport, divertor plasma physics and Plasma Wall Interaction (PWI) studies. It was obtained that more than 10 MW/m2 heat flux density for PWI studies. The closed divertor-simulator module has been newly installed. The first studies of this module have been done and obtained the expected plasma flow. We will strengthen the module functions and diagnostic capability and heating systems to enable to be more reactor-relevant simulator. In the core transport control by the ECH, correlation studies of the radial electric field profile and the fluctuations are made and the high coherency is confirmed by using the new two-point potential detector of the Gold Neutral Beam Probe(GNBP). The maximum electron temperature obtained so far is - 150 eV during the ECH by Thomson Scattering, but we need more studies for the high power ECH optimization. As one of the key tools for the new GAMMA 10/PDX project, 2 MW gyrotron development at 28 GHz has been started, based on the success of 77 GHz-1.9 MW output. The maximum outputs of 1 MW at 28 GHz in short pulse and 540kW for 2 s are obtained.
