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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.
W. A. Bongers, A. P. H. Goede, E. Westerhof, J. W. Oosterbeek, N. J. Doelman, F. C. Schüller, M. R. De Baar, W. Kasparek, W. Wubie, D. Wagner, J. Stober, TEXTOR Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 188-203
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4071
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) deteriorate high-pressure tokamak plasma confinement and can be suppressed by electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD). In order to obtain efficient suppression, the ECCD power needs to be deposited at the center of an NTM magnetic island. To enhance efficiency, this power also needs to be synchronized in phase with the rotation of the island. The problem is that of real-time detection and precise localization of the island(s) in order to provide the feedback signal required to control the ECCD power deposition area with an accuracy of 1 to 2 cm. Existing schemes based on mode location, equilibrium reconstruction, and plasma profile measurements are limited in positional and temporal accuracy and moreover will become very complex when applied to ITER. To overcome these limitations, it is proposed to provide the feedback signal from electron cyclotron emission (ECE) measurements taken along the identical line of sight as traced by the incident ECCD millimeter-wave beam but in reverse direction. Experiments on TEXTOR have demonstrated a proof of principle. These measurements motivate the further development and the implementation of such an ECCD-aligned ECE system for NTM control in larger fusion machines. Possible implementation of such a system on ASDEX-Upgrade, based on waveguides equipped with a fast directional switch, is presented in this paper. Possible further development for ITER is also discussed.