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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.
Peter H. Titus, L. Dudek, M. Smith, A. Brooks
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 416-422
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-993
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade (NSTX-U) is currently under construction at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) It is scheduled to start operations early in 2015. Upgrade designs were analyzed and qualified prior to the beginning of construction, but many issues arose during manufacture and assembly that required adjustments in design and analysis of components. Some designs relied on testing that occurred after final design when the actual material and processes were selected by vendors or in-house shops. Design of some components, like the bus bars, was deferred until field run interferences could be identified. Some components used materials that did not meet original specifications. New materials or processes had to be found and components sometimes needed requalification. PPPL responsible or “Cognizant Engineers” (COG’s) and analysts worked closely to work out resolution of issues and perform redesign and reanalysis. Revisions to calculations were prepared and filed. Some significant items addressed during the construction period (or Title III in DOE parlance) are selected for more detailed discussion.