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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.
T. Eich, A. Werner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 3 | April 2008 | Pages 761-779
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The heat load due to plasma radiation is estimated for the plasma wall components of the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X). A fully three-dimensional Monte Carlo code is used to simulate heating of first-wall components due to photon emission from the plasma. The plasma wall components can be described in a complex way with arbitrary shapes and orientation and flexible numerical representation. The volume radiation distribution is assumed to be described by poloidal symmetric and radially varying one-dimensional profiles aligned to the magnetic flux surfaces. A further example is given by a nonpoloidal symmetric radiation distribution following the five X point regions of the island divertor magnetic structure. Several realistic and artificial radiation profiles are chosen to investigate the local heat loads on an idealized plasma wall. The first detailed technical application of the code is the estimation of the local heat load on the Thomson scattering windows and on the inner surface of several vacuum ports of one half-module of the W7-X plasma vessel.
