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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.
Marco Ariola, Gianmaria De Tommasi, Didier Mazon, Didier Moreau, Fabio Piccolo, Alfredo Pironti, Filippo Sartori, Luca Zabeo, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 3 | April 2008 | Pages 789-805
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1735
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Advance tokamak scenarios are gaining more and more importance in operating tokamaks. These scenarios pose challenging control problems, since they require the simultaneous achievement of ambitious plasma parameters. The inherent coupling among the various variables calls for an integrated approach for the design of the controllers. This paper describes an example of integrated design recently implemented at JET: the control of plasma shape and boundary flux. After a brief description of the control problem, the paper focuses on the solution that has been adopted, presenting the technical details of the control scheme. The experimental results included in the paper are in agreement with the expected simulation results, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
