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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.
Y. Zhang, X. G. Wang, X. J. Wang, H. C. Hu, Y. Liu, A. Ti, L. Q. Xu, X. D. Zhang, EAST Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 1 | July 2016 | Pages 62-72
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-138
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper discusses a control system for the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) that suppresses neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) (3/2 and 2/1) by applying electron cyclotron (EC) heating and current drive. It allows the magnetic island to be detected and localized in real time and the EC beam to be deposited exactly on the island position by stepwise tuning of the steerable launch mirror. The mode features are identified with temperature perturbation to develop the algorithm for real-time island location. The necessary parameters for the design of the control system are discussed and determined based on simulation of the nonlinear island growth of NTMs with application of EC current drive. Although similar work has been done on many other devices, this is the first attempt on EAST.
