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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
R. Ikezoe, M. Ichimura, M. Hirata, T. Yokoyama, Y. Iwamoto, T. Okada, S. Sumida, K. Takeyama, S. Jang, T. Oi, K. Ichimura, Y. Nakashima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 63-69
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-853
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent ICRF heating experiments performed in GAMMA 10/PDX are reported. Owing to antenna-phasing technique and four ICRF antennas installed in the mirror cells other than the central cell, the operational regime of GAMMA 10/PDX is significantly extended. Several ICRF heating schemes to increase the parameters (plasma density in the central cell, particle flux flowing to the machine end and its ion temperature parallel to the field lines) are demonstrated. These results present positive progress in the ongoing divertor simulation experiments on GAMMA 10/PDX.
