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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.
Lajos L. Lengyel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 354-363
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24776
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Results of ignition and continuous fueling scenario calculations are presented that were obtained in the framework of an assessment performed f or the Next European Torus based on International Tokamak Reactor (INTOR) parameters. The results obtained with pellet injection are compared with results corresponding to gas puffing. Pellet injection transports fresh fuel to the reaction zone on a time scale that is much shorter than the diffusion time characterizing the gas puffing method, thus making the method flexible and readily adaptable to different situations. In the case of ignition by pellet injection, it may become possible to have deep neutral beam penetration and maintain favorable heat deposition profiles up to the moment of density ramp-up, thus substantially relaxing beam output requirements. Three beam energies (D0particles) have been considered: 120, 100, and 80 keV. The importance of a proper match between beam characteristics and pellet parameters, specific for the transport scaling assumed (Alcator-INTOR), is shown. In the case of continuous fueling o f an already ignited discharge, the alpha power production notably increases if repetitive pellet injection, instead of gas puffing, is applied. The advantages of pellet injection are substantial, even at moderate pellet velocities.
