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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
V. Loffelmann, J. Mlynar, M. Imrisek, D. Mazon, A. Jardin, V. Weinzettl, M. Hron
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 2 | April 2016 | Pages 505-513
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-180
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tomography inversion has been used routinely for processing outputs of plasma radiation diagnostics. Various tomographic algorithms have been developed, with those based on Tikhonov regularization being among the fastest while still providing reliable results. This paper presents a further speed optimization of the minimum Fisher Tikhonov regularization algorithm based on reducing iteration cycles used during the calculation. Ten to twentyfold speed gain is achieved compared to the original implementation. Robustness of the new method is demonstrated using both artificially generated data sets and real data from the soft X-ray diagnostics at the COMPASS tokamak. The advantage gained by the optimization is investigated in particular with respect to the possibility of real-time control of the plasma position; the option of impurity control is also discussed.