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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.
Clinton Craig Petty, James Craig DeBoo, Robert John La Haye, Timothy Charles Luce, Peter A. Politzer, Clement Po-Ching Wong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A245
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The design of a reduced size (R = 4.45 m, BT = 5.04 T) ignition tokamak (Q = ) with superconducting coils using a standard ELMing H-mode plasma appears to be feasible. This effective size (BT2/3R5/6) is smaller than current proposals for Q = 10 burning (D-T) plasma experiments. The good confinement required for ignition with this small effective size is obtained by operating along a gyroBohm scaling path starting from the existing tokamak database at high beta ( = 4.1%) so that the loss power from core transport exceeds the H-mode threshold power. Using a design that can achieve a high normalized current (Ip /aBT = 1.63) also helps to decrease the size of the machine. The design of this relatively compact ignition tokamak satisfies reasonable engineering constraints on the superconducting toroidal field coils and central solenoid, and allows for a sufficiently long burn time for the plasma current to relax to its final state.
