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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.
Y. Nakashima, T. Cho, T. Fukasawa, H. Higaki, M. Hirata, H. Hojo, M. Ichimura, K. Ishii, Y. Ishimoto, M. K. Islam, A. Itakura, T. Ito, I. Katanuma, S. Kobayashi, J. Kohagura, Y. Kubota, R. Minami, T. Numakura, T. Saito, B. S. Saosaki, Y. Takemura, Y. Tatematsu, M. Yoshida, M. Yoshikawa, K. Yatsu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 135-141
Transport and Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963580
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-density experiments using newly applied ioncyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) wave and neutral beam injection (NBI) in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror are described. A new ICRF wave system (RF3) with high harmonic frequency has been introduced for achieving high density. In addition, neutral beam injectors were recently installed at the central and anchor cells for fueling to target plasmas produced by ICRF waves. Arrays of Hα line-emission detectors are installed from the midplane of the central-cell to the anchor-cell in order to evaluate the particle source density around these regions. In a typical ICRF-heated hot-ion-mode plasma, both anchor and central NB's are injected together with the RF3 wave and the significant increase of the line-density in the central-cell up to ~8×1012 cm−2 was attained during the potential formation. It is confirmed that this high density is achieved under the ion temperature of three times higher than the value expected from the usual empirical boundary without using these new heating systems. An analysis of neutral particle transport using the Monte Carlo simulation code is developed to calculate the spatial profile of neutral density in non-axisymmetric region, such as anchor cell. Particle source rate is estimated based on detailed measurements of Hα line-emission from the central-cell to the east anchor-cell together with the neutral transport simulation.
