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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.
Lianghua Yao, Beibin Feng, Jaifu Dong, Yan Zhou, Zhengying Cui, Jianyong Cao, Nianyi Tang, Zhen Feng, Zhenggui Xiao, Xianming Song, Wenyu Hong, Enyao Wang, Yong Liu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 107-115
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A217
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As a new fueling method, supersonic molecular beam injection (SMBI) has been successfully developed and used in the HL-1M tokamak and HT-7 superconducting tokamak. SMBI can enhance penetration depth and fueling efficiency. It can be considered a significant improvement over conventional gas puffing. In recent experiments, hydrogen clusters have been found in the beam produced by high working gas pressure. The hydrogen particles of the beam have penetrated into the plasma center region, in which the average velocity of the injected beam is >1200 m/s. The rate of increase of electron density for SMBI, d[bar]ne/dt, approaches that of small ice pellet injection (PI). The plasma density increases step by step after multipulse SMBI, just as with the effects of multipellet fueling. Comparison of fueling effects was made between SMBI and small ice PI in the same shot of ohmic discharge in HL-1M.
