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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.
A. D. Beklemishev, D. I. Skovorodin, K. V. Zaytsev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 21-27
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-883
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In recent experiments on Gas Dynamic Trap (GDT), as well as in earlier experiments on the GOL-3 device, a new and interesting class of oscillations was observed. Its mode structure and frequency resemble that of a sound wave trapped in the mirror cell as a resonator. Such modes can strongly interact with the bounce motion of ions and thus affect the axial confinement in mirror traps. The modes are probably similar to the global acoustic modes (GAMs) in tokamaks. However, there are significant difficulties in reconciling the existence of such modes with conventional theory of plasma waves. In both GOL-3 and GDT in relevant regimes the electron temperature is far below the theoretical limit for existence (let alone weak Landau damping) of ion-sound waves in homogeneous plasma. We explore different models of inhomogeneous anisotropic non-Maxwellian plasma of a mirror trap in search for possible explanations of the observed phenomena.
