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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.
Toshihide Tsunematsu, Masahiro Seki, Hiroshi Tsuji, Kiyoshi Okuno, Takashi Kato, Kiyoshi Shibanuma, Masaya Hanada, Kazuhiro Watanabe, Keishi Sakamoto, Tsuyoshi Imai, Koichiro Ezato, Masato Akiba
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 75-93
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A214
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Japanese contributions to ITER engineering design activities are presented, together with an introduction of the objectives and design of the ITER, whose program has been carried out through international collaboration by the European Union, Japan, Russian Federation, and the United States. New technologies have been produced through the development, fabrication, and testing of scalable models in the fields of superconducting magnets, reactor structures with vacuum vessels, remote-maintenance machines, high-heat-flux plasma facing components, neutral beam injectors, high-power millimetre-wave generators, etc. As major contributions from Japan, development and testing results of a 13-T, 640-MJ, Nb3Sn pulsed magnet; an 18-deg sector of a vacuum vessel with a height of 15 m and a width of 9 m; CFC armor for a CuCrZr cooling tube that withstood 20 MW/m2; a 31 mA/cm2 negative ion beam source; a 1-MeV beam accelerator; and a 1-MW 170-GHz gyrotron are described.
