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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.
Gen Chen, Yuzhou Mao, Shuai Yuan, Kai Zhang, Yanping Zhao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | February 2017 | Pages 150-161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-214
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ion cyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) heating system of the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) is characterized by high radio-frequency (RF) power up to 12 MW and wide frequency range over 25 to 70 MHz. A high RF power transmission system composed of a liquid impedance matching device, ceramic feedthrough, decoupler, and ICRF heating antenna with four straps has been in operation for some years. In a high-power ICRF experiment, one issue that needs to be solved is the high RF voltage on the coaxial transmission line between the ICRF antenna and the impedance matching device, which is caused by low antenna loading resistance compared to the characteristic impedance of the transmission line. A stub tuner is employed to reduce the RF voltage in the EAST ICRF power transmission system. Two methods to reduce RF voltage using short-circuited and open-circuited stub tuners are introduced in detail. The optimized position and length of the stub tuner are analyzed and calculated to achieve a smaller voltage reduction ratio (VRR) on the transmission line. The test with the stub tuner to reduce the RF voltage of the transmission line is carried out, and a RF VRR of ~0.57 is achieved. The RF voltage on the transmission line is significantly reduced, and the capability of the transmission power is obviously improved. Ohmic losses caused by the surface resistance of the conductor of the coaxial transmission line are also decreased, and the probability of breakdown within the transmission line is reduced under high RF power operation.
