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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.
M. Cengher, J. Lohr, I. A. Gorelov, W. H. Grosnickle, D. Ponce, P. Johnson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 213-218
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4073
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The measurement of the power injected by the electron cyclotron heating (ECH) system in the DIII-D tokamak is a critical requirement for analysis of experiments, for tuning the gyrotrons for maximum power and efficiency, for tracking long-term operational trends, and for providing a warning of problems with the system. The ECH system at General Atomics consists of six 110-GHz, 1-MW-class gyrotrons. The radio-frequency (rf) power generated by each gyrotron is determined from calorimetry, using the relevant temperature and flow measurements from the cooling circuits of the cavity, matching optics unit, and dummy loads (DLs). The rf pulse length and time dependence are measured using an rf monitor at the first miter bend in the transmission line. The cavity power loading measured directly gives the generated rf power using a previously determined relationship between cavity loading and rf production. The direct measurement of the efficiencies of four of the transmission lines was performed using a high-power DL placed alternately in two positions of each DIII-D waveguide line, at accessible points close to the beginning and the end of each line. Total losses in the transmission lines range from 21.2 to 30.7%. Experimental results are compared to theoretical predictions of the performance of the components and waveguide lines.
