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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.
G. L. Kulcinski, J. F. Santarius, G. A. Emmert, R. L. Bonomo, G. E. Becerra, A. N. Fancher, L. M. Garrison, K. B. Hall, M. J. Jasica, A. M. McEvoy, M. X. Navarro, M. K. Michalak, C. M. Schuff
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 314-318
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-934
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For nearly two decades, as many as 4 Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) devices have been operated simultaneously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over that time period we have learned that the early perceptions of how IEC devices operate are quite different from the actual performance in the Laboratory. Over the past 2 years we have gained even more understanding of IEC physics and technology. Experimental measurements and theoretical improvements have better characterized both the negative ions that contribute up to ~10% of the fusion rate in some cases and the neutral energy distributions in IEC devices at moderate pressure (0.07-0.7 Pa ≈ 0.5-5 mTorr). We also now understand more of why operation with helium plasmas has such a detrimental effect on high voltage performance of the traditional tungsten alloy grid wires. Most of the previous IEC work had been confined to < 100 kV with short operation times up to 150 kV. We have recently expanded our operating regime to ≈ 200 kV anode-cathode potential difference, which is, to our knowledge, the highest-voltage IEC operation reported in the worldwide IEC literature. Several design modifications were required to achieve steady state operation at these high voltages and some are described in this article.