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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; Y. Koshurinov; L. Lubyako; M. I. Petelin; D. Yu. Shchegolkov; F. Hollmann; G. Michel; F. Noke; F. Purps; ECRH Groups at IPP Greifswald, IPF Stuttgart, IAP Nizhny Novgorod, FZK Karlsruhe, IFP Milano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 23-30
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4050
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments on the combination of the high-power wave beams from two gyrotrons and fast switching of the combined beam between two transmission channels are described. The measurements were performed using a high-power resonator diplexer in the optical transmission line of the electron cyclotron heating system for W7-X. The principle and the engineering design of the prototype four-port quasi-optical diplexer is presented. The wave beams from two gyrotrons with output powers of 370 and 560 kW, respectively, have been combined for pulse lengths up to 10 s, limited only by the uncooled mirrors used in the diplexer. By modulating the gyrotron frequency using a fast high-voltage body modulator, controlled toggling of the combined power between the two outputs of the diplexer was demonstrated with switching frequencies of up to 20 kHz.The experiments are compared to theory, showing good agreement when the limited stability of the free-running gyrotrons is taken into account.