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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.
Hongyu Bai, Yanfang Bi, Jingrong Wang, Ming Zhuang, Ping Zhu, Linhai Sheng, Qiyong Zhang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 162-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A224
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
HT-7U is a fully superconducting tokamak. All of the toroidal field and poloidal field superconducting magnets are made of NbTi superconductor and are designed to operate at 3.8 K in the steady-state operation mode. The magnet system will be cooled with forced-flow supercritical helium to this temperature level with an equivalent refrigeration capacity of ~2 kW/4.4 K. To satisfy this requirement, a helium refrigerator is designed to be able to provide the cooling power at 3.5, 4.5, and 80 K for the coils, supports, and thermal shields. The refrigerator can also produce liquid helium for the cooling of the current leads. This paper describes the cryogenic system of HT-7U, the refrigeration process and helium plant, and the forced-flow cooling requirement of the superconducting magnets.
