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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.
S. G. Cho, T. Lho, H. G. Choi, M.-K. Bae, I. J. Kang, D. H. Lee, S. K. Joo, K.-S. Chung
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 157-160
Technical Note | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-876
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigated charged dust and its effect on RF plasma by using a planar electric probe in a large-scale device. In background plasmas, the particle density is 108 to 109 cm−3 and the electron temperature is 2 to 4 eV. When dust is contained in plasma, it is negatively charged by electrons attached to the dust. The charged dust density and the charge were calculated by comparing dusty helium plasma to pure helium plasma. Depending on the increase in the amount of dust, the charged dust density increases with the decrease in the charge due to depletion of the electrons in the background plasma. The results show that the charge changes the interactions between the dust and particles in the background plasma.
