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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.
L. C. Cadwallader, P. I. Petersen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 382-387
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Tritium and Safety and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A364
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The reliability of selected DIII-D vacuum components has been studied to give indications of how well the vacuum confinement would perform if a liquid wall experiment were operated on a device such as the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX). Data from the DIII-D vessel and vacuum system are generally applicable to the NSTX because their designs are similar. The DIII-D has accumulated operating experience data over 15 years of operations, and DIII-D-specific reliability values are comparable to previous reliability estimates for vacuum components.
