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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.
M. E. Rensink, T. D. Rognlien
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 125-141
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-800
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulations of the heat flux on plasma-facing components from core exhaust plasma are reported for two possible ACT1 divertor configurations. One configuration uses divertor plates strongly inclined with respect to the poloidal magnetic flux surfaces similar to that planned for ITER and results in a partially detached divertor plasma. The second configuration has divertor plates orthogonal to the flux surfaces, which leads to a fully detached divertor plasma if the width of the divertor region is sufficient. Both configurations use scrape-off layer radiation from seeded impurities to yield an acceptable peak heat flux of ∼10 MW/m2 or smaller on the divertor plates and chamber walls. The simulations are performed with the UEDGE two-dimensional transport code to model both plasma and neutral components with some supplementary neutral modeling performed with the DEGAS 2 Monte Carlo code.