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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.
H. Takenaga, H. Kubo, S. Higashijima, N. Asakura, T. Sugie, S. Konoshima, K. Shimizu, T. Nakano, K. Itami, A. Sakasai, H. Tamai, S. Sakurai, Y. Miura, N. Hosogane, M. Shimada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 2 | September-November 2002 | Pages 327-356
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A232
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heat and particle control has been studied under the reactor-relevant high-power heating in the large tokamak of JT-60U with an open divertor and progressively a W-shaped pumped divertor. Heat and particle control is crucial for reduction in heat load onto the divertor plates, control of density in the main plasma, effective exhaust of helium ash, and reduction in impurity contamination. For the reduction of heat load, radiative divertor concept was developed based on understanding of heat and particle transport in scrape-off layer and divertor plasmas, which contributed to establishment of divertor concept in ITER. With argon injection, the total radiation loss power reached up to 80% of the net heating power with high confinement of HHy2 ~ 1, where HHy2 is a confinement enhancement factor over the IPB98(y,2) ELMy H-mode scaling, at high density of 80% of the Greenwald density in the ELMy H-mode plasma. For the density control, the dependence of particle confinement on plasma parameters was systematically studied with two confinement times for center- and edge-fueled particles, which enabled discussion of density controllability. Core fueling using a high-field-side pellet injection extended the operation range of high confinement (HHy2 ~ 1) from 60 to 70% of the Greenwald density in the high p ELMy H-mode plasma. Efficient helium ash exhaust of He*/E = 2.8 was demonstrated in the ELMy H-mode plasma with the pumping from the private flux region, which is the same pumping geometry as that in ITER design. Reduction in Zeff by puff-and-pump scheme was demonstrated, and chemical sputtering yields were estimated with the consideration of not only methane but also heavier hydrocarbons. Their sputtering yields showed strong dependence on the wall temperature and weak dependence on the particle flux. The measured profiles of C II and C IV line intensities were well reproduced by the Monte Carlo impurity transport simulation code (IMPMC code). The estimation of sputtering yields and development of the simulation code enabled reliable predictions for impurity behavior in a fusion reactor.
