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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.
M. Lennholm, L-G. Eriksson, F. Turco, F. Bouquey, C. Darbos, R. Dumont, G. Giruzzi, M. Jung, R. Lambert, R. Magne, D. Molina, P. Moreau, F. Rimini, J-L. Segui, S. Song, E. Traisnel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 45-55
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4052
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Closed loop control of the period of fast ion stabilized sawtooth has been demonstrated for the first time on Tore Supra by varying the electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) injection angles in real time. Fast ions generated by up to 4 MW of central ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) increased the sawtooth period from the ohmic value of 25 ms to 60 to 100 ms. This sawtooth period was reduced to 30 ms by the addition of only 300 kW of ECCD. In ICRH heated shots where the normalized minor radius of the ECCD absorption location was swept from 0.4 to 0.05 in 4 s, the sawtooth period showed an abrupt change from 70 to 30 ms when the ECCD deposition normalized minor radius reached ~0.2. This short period was then maintained until the absorption location moved well inside the sawtooth inversion radius at which point it abruptly returned to 70 ms. A closed loop controller was implemented that allowed the sawtooth period to be switched in real time between short and long sawteeth with a response time of the order of 1 s.
