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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. Coelho, S. Matejcik, P. McCarthy, E. P. Suchkov, F. S. Zaitsev, EU-IM Team, ASDEX Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 3 | May 2016 | Pages 611-619
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-177
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An important direction of fusion research is the reconstruction of plasma equilibrium from measurements. Most of the plasma modeling codes and plasma control systems use equilibrium data on input. Therefore, the accuracy of reconstructions plays a crucial role in fundamental understanding of processes in present-day devices and fusion reactors. The results of previous research show that one can get substantially different reconstructions of plasma current densities and safety factors, which fit the measurements even within a relatively small inaccuracy. So, rigorous calculation of the reconstructed function error bars is required. This paper presents new advances in formulation of the equilibrium reconstruction problem for the epsilon-net (ε-net) framework, describes application of the ε-net technique for rigorous calculation of the reconstruction error bars and its implementation in the European Integrated Modeling (EU-IM) platform, and gives examples of error bar evaluation for ASDEX Upgrade concentrating on the plasma pressure constraint analysis.