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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Thomas Rummel, W7-X Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 387-396
Plenary II | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 2) Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A19128
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) experimental device is presently being built at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany.The modularity of the machine is achieved using five identical modules which form a torus of 16 meters outer diameter. Each module consists of a plasma vessel, ten non-planar main field coils, four planar coils and an outer vessel sector with ports. To achieve steady-state operation, the coils are superconducting. Two different plasma heating systems, ECRH and NBI, are planned for the first operation phase of W7-X.Module-based assembly is a new approach for large fusion machines. There are three main assembly steps of the core machine. First, half-modules are assembled from a plasma vessel section, five non-planar and two planar coils and related support structures. In the second step, two half-modules are connected to form a module. Then the five modules are connected, after which the outer vessel is closed.The paper reports on about the latest progress in assembly, highlighting the most challenging tasks, describes future work leading to the start of W7-X commissioning in 2014.
