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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.
S. E. Sharapov, L.-G. Eriksson, A. Fasoli, G. Gorini, J. Källne, V. G. Kiptily, A. A. Korotkov, A. Murari, S. D. Pinches, D. S. Testa, P. R. Thomas
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 4 | May 2008 | Pages 989-1022
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Joint European Torus (jet) | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1745
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Studies establishing key phenomena and developing diagnostics for energetic particle physics, which are essential for the next step burning plasma experiments such as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), have been performed at the Joint European Torus (JET). Experiments have demonstrated clear self-heating of deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasma by alpha particles as a maximum in electron temperature at an optimum mixture of 60 ± 20% tritium. The change in electron temperature produced by alpha heating, Te(0) = 1.3 ± 0.23 keV, was as expected from classical heating, whereas the heating of thermal ions was higher than expected from reference deuterium discharges. Alfvén eigenmodes were stable in the highest fusion performance D-T plasmas, in agreement with the modeling. Systematic studies on the existence and properties of Alfvén eigenmodes with external antenna driving and detecting Alfvén eigenmodes are presented. The formation of fuel ion tails due to alpha-particle knock-on effects is described as derived from neutral particle analyzer and neutron emission spectrometry in D-T experiments. The gamma-ray diagnostics are shown to measure profiles and energy distribution functions of high-energy ions and alpha particles. Time- and space-resolved gamma-ray images demonstrated for the first time the possibility of measuring several types of energetic ions simultaneously. The novel technique of detecting unstable Alfvén eigenmodes with interferometry is found to be superior in detecting core-localized Alfvén eigenmodes.