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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.
P. C. de Vries, G. Pautasso, D. Humphreys, M. Lehnen, S. Maruyama, J. A. Snipes, A. Vergara, L. Zabeo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 2 | April 2016 | Pages 471-484
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-176
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To protect ITER from the high thermal and electromagnetic loads resulting from disruptions, prevention of such events is an essential part of the ITER plasma control system, backed up by an effective and reliable disruption mitigation system (DMS). An important aspect of the mitigation action is its trigger, the balanced decision that a disruption can no longer be prevented by scenario or stability control action and that mitigating action needs to be taken. This paper discusses the requirements for this decision process or trigger for the DMS, the expected timescales, the reliability and performance, and the possible strategy of how this may be developed for ITER high-performance operation.
