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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.
F. Liu, H. Liu, S. Liu, B. Liu, L. Lei, C. Chen, Y. Wu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 208-213
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-729
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
China is charged with around 7.5% of the ITER toroidal field (TF) conductor fabrication. In total about 6000 km of Nb3Sn strands need to be supplied for Chinese Domestic Agency (CNDA), and now the TF procurement arrangement (PA) for CNDA is in the last phase, i.e., production. According to the PA, the Domestic Agency (DA) has to verify on a regular basis the room and low temperature measurements carried out by the strand suppliers. The verifications shall be performed by the reference laboratories on the strand verification samples adjacent to the samples used by the strand suppliers for critical current measurements. As the reference laboratory of CNDA, the superconducting strand test laboratory of Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) is undertaking the task of Nb3Sn strand verification. The verifications include diameter, chromium plating thickness, twist pitch direction and length, copper-to-non-copper volume ratio, residual resistance ratio (RRR), critical current (IC) and resistive transition index (n), and hysteresis loss. The verification level was based on the requirements of the ITER PA. From the results, the supplied strands for the TF conductors fulfill well the requirements of the ITER PA.
