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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.
J. D. Kilkenny, P. M. Bell, D. K. Bradley, D. L. Bleuel, J. A. Caggiano, E. L. Dewald, W. W. Hsing, D. H. Kalantar, R. L. Kauffman, D. J. Larson, J. D. Moody, D. H. Schneider, M. B. Schneider, D. A. Shaughnessy, R. T. Shelton, W. Stoeffl, K. Widmann, C. B. Yeamans, S. H. Batha, G. P. Grim, H. W. Herrmann, F. E. Merrill, R. J. Leeper, J. A. Oertel, T. C. Sangster, D. H. Edgell, M. Hohenberger, V. Yu. Glebov, S. P. Regan, J. A. Frenje, M. Gatu-Johnson, R. D. Petrasso, H. G. Rinderknecht, A. B. Zylstra, G. W. Cooper, C. Ruiz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 1 | January-February 2016 | Pages 420-451
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-173
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the completion of the National Ignition Campaign (NIC), the National Ignition Facility (NIF) had about 36 different types of diagnostics. These were based on several decades of development on Nova and OMEGA and involved the whole U.S. inertial confinement fusion community. In 1994, the Joint Central Diagnostic Team documented a plan for a limited set of NIF diagnostics in the NIF Conceptual Design Report. Two decades later, these diagnostics, and many others, were installed workhorse tools for all users of NIF. We give a short description of each of the 36 different types of NIC diagnostics grouped by the function of the diagnostics, namely, target drive, target response and target assembly, stagnation, and burn. A comparison of NIF diagnostics with the Nova diagnostics shows that the NIF diagnostic capability is broadly equivalent to that of Nova in 1999. Although NIF diagnostics have a much greater degree of automation and rigor than Nova’s, new diagnostics are limited such as the higher-speed X-ray imager. Recommendations for future diagnostics on the NIF are discussed.
