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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. Takeiri, S. Kubo, T. Shimozuma, M. Yokoyama, M. Osakabe, K. Ikeda, K. Tsumori, Y. Oka, K. Nagaoka, Y. Yoshimura, K. Ida, H. Funaba, S. Murakami, K. Tanaka, B. J. Peterson, I. Yamada, N. Ohyabu, K. Ohkubo, O. Kaneko, A. Komori, LHD Experimental Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | July 2004 | Pages 106-114
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A546
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The electron internal transport barrier (ITB) is formed with centrally focused electron cyclotron resonance heating superposed on plasmas heated by neutral beam injection in the Large Helical Device. The electron transport is investigated for the electron ITB plasmas observed in various magnetic axis positions of Rax = 3.6, 3.75, and 3.9 m, and it turns out that the core electron transport is reduced with suppression of the anomalous transport in all three magnetic axis positions. In the theoretical calculations, positive radial electric fields are generated in the improved transport region, implying that the electron ITB formation is correlated with the neoclassical electron root. At an outer-shifted configuration of Rax = 3.9 m, where the helical ripple is large, the thermal diffusivity is decreased with decreasing collisionality, suggesting the reduction of the ripple transport by the radial electric field. The temperature and density conditions for the ITB formation are consistent with the theoretical density dependence of the transition temperature to the neoclassical electron root from the ion root.
