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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.
(Prepared by P.L. Mondino, E. Bertolini)
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1375-1385
Machine Upgrades and Next-Generation Device | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24922
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Three years have passed since the Joint European Torus (JET) started operation in June 1983. Phase I of the scientific programme, devoted to ohmic heating studies, has been completed. Phase II, devoted to additional heating studies started in January 1985. From the technical point of view JET has been entirely successful: indeed the plasma current, an important figure of merit for a tokamak, has reached 5.1 MA for 3s, (exceeding the design value of 4.8 MA). Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating has added up to 6 MW to the plasma and Neutral Beam Injection has added up to 10 MW. The energy confinement time in ohmic discharges has reached 0.8s; but degradation has been observed with additional heating. Recently, combined heating (Padd up to 14.5 MW) allowed achievement of ion and electron temperatures of −7.5 keV at densities of ∼3 − 1019 m−3. Several proposals for improvements of the JET scientific performance are reported in the paper and summarised in the new development programme.