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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.
Dennis J. Strickler, Steven P. Hirshman, Donald A. Spong, Michael J. Cole, James F. Lyon, Bradley E. Nelson, David E. Williamson, Andrew S. Ware
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 1 | January 2004 | Pages 15-26
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A421
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A compact quasi-poloidally symmetric stellarator (QPS) plasma and coil configuration is described that has desirable physics properties and engineering feasibility with a very low aspect ratio plasma bounded by good magnetic flux surfaces both in vacuum and at <> = 2%. The plasma is robust with respect to variations of pressure and the resulting bootstrap current, which leave the bounding flux surface approximately unchanged and thus reduce active positional control requirements. This configuration was developed by reconfiguring the QPS modular coils and applying a new computational method that maximizes the volume of good (integrable) vacuum flux surfaces as a measure of robustness. The stellarator plasma and coil design code STELLOPT is used to vary the coil geometry to determine the plasma geometry and profiles that optimize plasma performance with respect to neoclassical transport, infinite-n ballooning stability up to <> = 2%, and coil engineering parameters. The normal component of the vacuum magnetic field is simultaneously minimized at the full-beta plasma boundary.