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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.
Kazunori Takahashi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 123-126
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16886
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A thrust imparted by a permanent-magnets helicon plasma thruster is directly measured by using a pendulum thrust balance. The source consists of a 6.5-cm-inner diameter glass tube and a magnetic nozzle provided by arrays of permanent magnets. The configuration is designed so as to have maximum field strength of about 100 Gauss near the open end of the source. The flow rate of argon propellant is chosen as 25 sccm and a plasma is produced by 13.56 MHz helicon and/or inductively coupled discharges. The main plasma is guided by the magnetic nozzle and flows out from the source. It is observed that the whole structure of the source attached to the pendulum balance moves only during the plasma production, and its displacement is measured by a laser displacement sensor. The obtained maximum thrust is presently 7.5 mN for 2 kW rf power.
