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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
F. Albajar, M. Bornatici, F. Engelmann, A. B. Kukushkin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 76-83
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4055
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The codes SNECTR, CYTRAN, CYNEQ, and EXACTEC are compared in view of the calculation of the profile of the net electron cyclotron (EC) wave power density emitted for different electron temperature profiles and average temperatures of relevance for reactor-grade magnetoplasmas. The effects of either specularly or diffusely reflecting walls are assessed for a cylindrical plasma with circular cross-section, specular reflection, as assumed in EXACTEC, providing a lower bound to the net EC wave power losses in the hot plasma core (and therefore, as a rule, also to the total EC power loss) as well as to reabsorption in the edge plasma. The assumption of isotropy of the radiation intensity in the plasma that is adopted in both CYTRAN and CYNEQ (which cannot be justified a priori) is discussed and found to be adequate for strong diffuse reflection. However, it overestimates the net EC power loss in the plasma core for weakly as well as for specularly reflecting walls by up to 20%. The full transport code SNECTR (no longer in active use), for specular reflection, and the exact cylindrical code EXACTEC are in excellent agreement with each other while for strong diffuse reflection EXACTEC is found to underestimate the net EC power loss typically by 20%. EXACTEC, CYTRAN, and CYNEQ are confirmed to be well suited for use in systematic transport simulations of fusion plasmas.
