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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.
R. Yasuhara et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 408-410
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16970
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel configuration of a photon recycling probe laser system for Thomson scattering (TS) system is proposed to measure electron temperature and density of the divertor region in GAMMA10 by using a polarization control multi-pass technique. This configuration can use for simultaneous measurements of the multi-pass TS measurement of the central plasma and the 1 pass measurement of the divertor plasma. To confirm the feasibility of the new method, we have installed double pass TS system in the GAMMA 10 central plasma. As the result, the scattering light intensity at the second pass has maintained more than 95% of first pass signal. By using a same solid angle and a scattering volume of the GAMMA10 central TS system, electron density of 2×1018 m-3 will be measured at the divertor region.
