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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.
Y. Nakashima et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 100-105
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16881
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the new research plan of Plasma Research Center of the University of Tsukuba, a high heat-flux divertor simulator (E-Divertor) was proposed by using an end-mirror exit of a large tandem mirror GAMMA 10/PDX device. Experiments for characterization of end-loss plasma flux have been extensively performed at the end-mirror region of GAMMA 10/PDX and detailed behavior of end-loss particles has been investigated. In standard hot-ion mode plasmas (ne0 ~ 21018 m-3, Ti0 ~ 5 keV), the energy analysis of ion flux was performed by using end-loss ion energy analyzer (ELIEA). It was found that the high ion temperature (100 - 400 eV) is generated and has a liner relationship between diamagnetism in the central-cell. The ion temperature determined from the probe and calorimetric measurements gives a good agreement with the ELIEA measurement. Additional ICRF heating in the anchor-cell showed a significant increase of particle flux, which indicated an effectiveness of additional plasma heating in adjacent cells. Superimposing the ECH pulse of 380 kW, 5 ms induces a remarkable enhancement of heat flux and a peak value in the net heat-flux density more than 10 MW/m2 was attained during the ECH injection, which comes up to the heat-load level of the divertor plate of ITER. Recently a large-scale divertor simulation experimental module (D-module) was installed in the west end-cell and the first plasma irradiation experiments onto a new tungsten V-shaped target were successfully performed. A number of interesting results such as neutral compression, enhancement of recycling and impurity radiation during noble gas injection, have been observed.
