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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.
S. Moriyama, T. Fujii, H. Kimura, K. Anno, K. Yokokura, S. Shinozaki, M. Terakado, S. Hiranai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 2 | September-November 2002 | Pages 467-481
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Research and developments on the ion cyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) heating system in the JT-60 upgrade (JT-60U) are presented. The developments and experiences on the operation of the ICRF heating system contribute to its upgrade and to future ICRF heating systems in ITER. The ICRF heating system for JT-60U started operation in January 1992. RF power up to 7 MW for 1.1 sec at 116 MHz has been coupled to a plasma as a result of the developments described in this paper. New high power tetrodes having pyrolitic graphite grids for higher dissipation of screen and control grids were tested in the ICRF amplifier, and 1.7 MW of the output power at 131 MHz for 5.4 seconds was achieved. This was the highest power level for fusion research above 110 MHz in 1990. A pair of phased loop antenna arrays (2 × 2) showed sufficiently high coupling resistance. To keep the impedance matching between the antenna and the transmission line, a frequency feedback control (FFC) system was developed, and its effectiveness was proved to couple high power RF continuously to the variable plasma. In ITER, enhancement of dielectric loss tangent of ceramics due to neutron irradiation will limit power injection capability of the antenna significantly. To solve this problem, an all-metal support (AMS) was developed in the JT-60U ICRF heating system as a substitute for a ceramic support of a central conductor of a coaxial antenna feeder in the ITER ICRF antenna.
