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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.
G. Hornung, A. Shabbir, G. Verdoolaege
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 3 | May 2016 | Pages 586-594
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-192
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The possibility of inferring the properties of electron density fluctuations in tokamak plasmas from a reflectometer signal by means of Bayesian methods is investigated. Within the physical optics approximation, the interaction of the probing beam with the plasma is described as reflection from a surface with stochastic properties that is simulated numerically. A Bayesian technique is outlined to solve the inverse problem to determine the surface characteristics from the power spectrum of the reflectometer signal. It is shown that satisfactory estimates of the length and timescales and the amplitude of density fluctuations can be obtained in conditions relevant to core tokamak plasmas.
