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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.
Caipin Zhou, Jiancheng Yan, Yong Liu, Dequan Liu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 102-106
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A216
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the recent progress of the HL-2A project. HL-2A is the first tokamak with divertor in China. The main parameters of HL-2A are major radius, R = 1.64 m; minor radius, r = 0.38 m; toroidal field, Bt = 2.8 T; plasma current, Ip = 480 kA; and current flattop time, t = 2 to 5 s. Subjects related to the divertor, confinement, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities, heating and current drive, fueling, etc., will be investigated with HL-2A. Significant progress in the construction of the HL-2A tokamak has been achieved recently. This paper describes the development of major components and the installation of the machine. The commissioning of the HL-2A machine will begin in the middle of 2002. The HL-2A physics research program has been proposed and will emphasize the divertor, MHD instabilities, and confinement.
