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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Songtao Wu, Weiyue Wu, Yinnian Pan, Damao Yao, Ziying Liao, Yanfang Bi, Zhuoming Chen, Baozeng Li, Yuntao Song, Wenge Chen, Jin Fang, Peide Weng, Daming Gao, Jiangang Li, Yuanxi Wan, Honqiang Li, Wanjiang Pan, Junling Chen, Jing Wei
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 146-154
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A222
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The HT-7U superconducting (SC) tokamak will have a long-pulse capability, a flexible poloidal field (PF) system, and auxiliary heating and current drive systems, and it will be able to accommodate divertor heat loads that make it an attractive test for the development of advanced tokamak operating modes. The greatest progress has been made on the engineering design of the HT-7U SC tokamak device, including the calculation and simulation of plasma shaping and control of the PF system as well as calculation and analyses of stress and deformation distribution on the main components caused by dynamic electromagnetic forces, vacuum pressure, temperature differences, etc. Significant research and development progress on the design and the testing of the cable-in-conduit conductor of the toroidal field and PF has been made. A test facility system for the SC magnets of HT-7U has been set up and operated.
