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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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. Albanese, M. De Magistris, R. Fresa, F. Maviglia, S. Minucci
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 4 | November 2015 | Pages 741-749
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-127
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We consider the problem of the accurate tracing of long magnetic field lines in tokamaks, which is in general crucial for the determination of the plasma boundary as well as for the magnetic properties of the scrape-off layer. Accurate field line tracing is strictly related to basic properties of ordinary differential equation (ODE) integrators, in terms of preservation of invariant properties and local accuracy for long-term analysis. We introduce and discuss some assessment criteria and a procedure for the specific problem, using them to compare standard ODE solvers with a volume-preserving algorithm for given accuracy requirements. In particular, after the validation for an axisymmetric plasma, a three-dimensional (3-D) configuration is described by means of Clebsch potentials, which provide analytical invariants for assessing the accuracy of the numerical integration. A standard fourth-order Runge-Kutta routine at fixed step is well suited to the problem in terms of reduced computational burden, with extremely good results for accuracy and volume preservation. Then we tackle the problem of field line tracing in the determination of plasma-wall gaps for a 3-D configuration, demonstrating the effective feasibility of the plasma boundary evaluation in tokamaks by tracing field lines with standard tools.
