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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.
K. Ueno, Y. Oshio, I. Funaki, H. Yamakawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 392-394
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16965
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Magnetoplasma Sail (MPS) is one of the sail propulsion system using the solar wind and suitable for deep space exploration. MPS uses an artificial magnetic field for capturing the solar wind, which is generated by a combination of a coil and a plasma injection. In order to measure thrust of a miniature MPS directory, a parallelogram-pendulum-type thrust stand was developed and installed on MPS ground simulator. In comparison with 0.6 N of Magnetic Sail thrust for 90 mm-magnetosphere, when the magnetospheric size for 115 mm was produced, 4.0 N thrust of the miniature MPS was obtained. The thrust value may include thrust originated with MPD arcjets used for magnetospheric inflation. Our next step of thrust measurement is evaluation of thrust increment for magnetospheric inflation.
