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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.
L. Zang, T. Mizuuchi, N. Nishino, S. Ohshima, S. Yamamoto, Y. C. Sun, K. Kasajima, M. Takeuchi, K. Mukai, H. Y. Lee, N. Kenmochi, Y. Ohtani, K. Nagasaki, S. Kado, H. Okada, T. Minami, S. Kobayashi, N. Shi, S. Konoshima, Y. Nakamura, F. Sano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 4 | November 2015 | Pages 758-765
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-862
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the medium-sized heliotron device Heliotron J, edge density fluctuation has been measured simultaneously with a high-speed video camera and a Langmuir probe. Poloidally propagating, parallel elongating filamentary structures with 20- to 30-kHz frequency and ~14-cm poloidal wavelength were observed by a camera. However, the radial position of this density mode is not well known with only camera data because the camera lens axis is perpendicular to the torus plane. To identify the span of this density mode, plasma-surface interaction (PSI) between the probe and the plasma has been analyzed. As the probe scanned into the plasma, enhanced brightness due to PSI was clearly observed in camera images. By comparing this enhanced brightness among different probe positions, the outmost margin of the 20- to 30-kHz mode observed by the camera has been identified to be within 10 mm outside from the last closed flux surface. This conclusion is supported by the spectrum of the probe data.
