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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.
V. Erckmann; W. Kasparek; G. Gantenbein; F. Hollmann; L. Jonitz; F. Noke; F. Purps; M. Weissgerber; W7-X ECRH Teams at IPP Greifswald, FZK Karlsruhe, IPF Stuttgart
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 16-22
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4049
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) is the main heating system for W7-X. A 10-MW ECRH plant with continuous wave (cw) capability is under construction to support the W7-X operation, which aims at demonstrating the steady-state capability of stellarators at reactor-relevant plasma parameters. The ECRH system consists of ten radio-frequency (rf) modules with 1 MW power each at 140 GHz. The rf beams of the individual gyrotrons are transmitted in common to the W7-X torus via open multibeam mirror lines. The losses of individual components of the transmission system were measured with both low- and high-power methods. Integrated full-power, cw measurements of the long-distance transmission losses are reported and compared to theoretical design estimates.
