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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
J. Li et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 417-423
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-A19131
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) was built to demonstrate high power, long pulse operation under fusion relevant conditions, and provide a viable platform for next-step steady-state magnetic confinement fusion development. Significant progress has been made in EAST on both technology and physics fronts, achieving full plasma current of 1 MA, long pulse operation over 400 s, entirely driven by Lower Hybrid Current Drive (LHCD), and high confinement plasmas, i.e., H-modes, over 30 s with combined operation of LHCD and Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating (ICRH). New and exciting physics with dominant RF heating has started to emerge, as evidenced by new findings on LHCD-induced 3D edge magnetic topology, new small Edge Localized Mode (ELM) regime and role of zonal flows during the L-H transition, etc. Various means for mitigating ELMs have also been explored to facilitate long pulse operation, including SMBI, D2 pellet injection, as well as innovative solid Li granule injection. A brief overview of these recent advances is presented.
