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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.
M. Kawai, N. Akino, N. Ebisawa, L. Grisham, M. Hanada, A. Honda, T. Inoue, M. Kazawa, K. Kikuchi, M. Kuriyama, N. Kusanagi, K. Mogaki, K. Noto, T. Ohga, K. Ooshima, Y. Tanai, N. Umeda, K. Usui, T. Yamamoto, H. Yamazaki, K. Watanabe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 508-512
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Plasma Engineering, Heating, and Current Drive | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A387
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The negative-ion based neutral beam injection system developed by JAERI for JT-60U has been intended to generate a 500 keV and 10 MW beam for 10 seconds with two ion sources. Technical efforts to decrease heat loads on the accelerator grids, to improve non-uniformity of the source plasma, to increase voltage holding of the accelerator, and to optimize the operational parameters have been conducted intensively. A step-down control of the filament voltage was very effective to keep the acceleration current constant during the pulse duration. To suppress degradation of voltage holding of the accelerator, protection spark gaps of ~178 kV for each stage, its gap length is 73 mm, were confirmed to be effective.As results of these improvements, as of June 2002, the maximum injection power has reached 6.2 MW, and a pulse length has attained 10 seconds of the design value with a 2.6 MW beam.
