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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. Hirata, S. Nagashima, T. Cho, J. Kohagura, M. Yoshida, H. Ito, S. Tokioka, T. Numakura, R. Minami, Y. Nakashima, T. Kondoh, K. Yatsu, S. Miyoshi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 262-264
Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A11963608
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the purpose of observations of the absolute values of ion-end-loss currents in open-field plasma devices including the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror, a newly developed electrostatic ion-current detector is proposed on the basis of a “self-collection” principle for secondary-electron emission from a metal collector. The newly developed ion-current detector is constructed with a set of parallelly placed metal plates with respect to lines of ambient magnetic forces in an open-ended device. One of the most essential characteristic properties of the proposed detector is based on the physics principle of a “self-collection” mechanism due to E×B drifts for secondary electrons impinged by ion-current collections from the metal-plate collector; that is, the secondary electrons are returned back into the collector through E×B drifts by the use of no further additional magnetic systems except the ambient open-ended fields B. The proposed idea is tested in an ion-beam line along with an additional set of the Helmholtz coil for producing and mocking up open-ended fields for simulating the GAMMA10 magnetic fields. The characterization experimental data in the ion-beam line give good agreement with computer-simulated trajectory-calculation results. The novel ion-current detector is preliminarily and usefully applied to the GAMMA10 plasma experiments.
