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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.
D. A. Hartmann
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 2 | February 2008 | Pages 44-55
Technical Paper | Introduction | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1690
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Stellarators are toroidal devices where the required rotational transform of the magnetic field lines is generated by external field coils and not via an induced net toroidal plasma current. This confinement scheme has the advantages that, in principle, steady-state plasma operation is possible and that it does not have to brace itself against disruptions of a toroidal plasma current. At the cost of having to give up toroidal symmetry the properties of the stellarator field can be tailored to suit reactor needs. Research focuses on the plasma confinement properties of different stellarator fields and investigates the problems arising when one extrapolates to reactor parameters.
