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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
Masami Fujiwara, Nobuyoshi Ohyabu, Keisuke Matsuoka, Shoichi Okamura, Osamu Motojima, Tokuhiro Obiki, Fumimichi Sano, Katsumi Kondo, Masahiro Wakatani, Tohru Mizuuchi, Kiyoshi Hanatani, Yuji Nakamura, Kazunobu Nagasaki, Hiroyuki Okada, Sakae Besshou, Masahiko Nakasuga
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 32-49
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A211
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental results are summarized for major helical devices in Japan: Large Helical Device (LHD), Compact Helical System (CHS), and Heliotron J. The LHD and CHS have planar magnetic axes, while Heliotron J has a nonplanar magnetic axis.The LHD, the largest superconducting device in the world, has the following machine parameters: major radius R of 3.9 m, average minor radius a of 0.6 m, magnetic field on axis B of 3 T, multipolarity l of 2, toroidal period number m of 10, and auxiliary heating power P of ~14 MW. The LHD achieved the maximum stored energy Wp dia of > 1 MJ, the maximum value of the volume averaged beta <dia*gt; of >3.0% at B of 0.5 T, high confinement time E of 0.3 s at Te(0) of 1.1 keV and <ne> of 6.5 × 1019 m-3, and long pulse operations up to 120 s at high temperature.The CHS has the following machine parameters: R = 1 m, a = 0.2 m, l = 2, and m = 8. The parameters of neutral beam heated plasmas are in the range with <ne> of ~4 to 5 × 1019 m-3, Te(0) of 500 to 700 eV, and energy confinement time of several milliseconds. Progress has been made in studies of bifurcation phenomena of electric potential, neoclassical internal transport barriers, and plasma flows in the toroidal and poloidal directions.The most important achievement from recent CHS and LHD experiments is to realize the internal transport barriers on the basis of potential bifurcation.Heliotron J, which was converted from the Heliotron E (H-E) device, employs a helical magnetic axis by the use of l = 1 continuous helical coil and auxiliary coils such as poloidal and toroidal coils. The machine parameters are as follows: R = 1.2 m, a = 0.1 to 0.2 m, and B = 1 to 1.5 T. Initial results show the maximum stored energy Wp ~ 0.7 kJ and <> ~ 0.2%.The range of plasma parameters has been greatly expanded by the LHD, CHS, H-E, and Heliotron J experiments. The confinement data in helical devices are scaled empirically as ISS-95 (International Stellarator Scaling), and plasma performance is comparable with that in tokamaks.
