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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.
A. V. Anikeev, V. V. Prikhodko, D. V. Yurov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 70-75
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-863
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Substantial progress in experimental results was demonstrated over the last three years at the GDT facility (a hydrogen prototype of a fusion neutron source) in the Budker Institute: the electron temperature has been increased up to 0.6 keV, and the relative plasma pressure β has exceeded 0.5 in a quasi-stationary regime. These parameters are records for axisymmetric open mirror traps.
The first part of this paper presents the results of numerical simulations for a moderate fusion neutron source based on the achieved GDT experimental data. The second part of the paper is focused on the latest numerical studies of a fusion-fission hybrid system with a mirror-based neutron source.
