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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.
Kieran J. McCarthy, Maria A. Ochando, Francisco Medina, Bernardo Zurro, Carlos Hidalgo, Maria de los Angeles Pedrosa, Ignacio Pastor, Jesús A. Herranz, Alfonso Baciero
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | July 2004 | Pages 129-134
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A548
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fine-grained mobile pyrolytic graphite limiter was biased to generate radial electric fields in the plasma edge region of the TJ-II stellarator to improve confinement operation modes. Indeed, for the range of voltages applied (up to ±300 V), spectroscopic data indicate that limiter biasing does not induce significant external influxes of impurities. Also, after boronization of the vacuum chamber, increases of ~100% in electron density, together with reductions of the order of 40% in Zeff, are observed during limiter biasing. Here, we report on the first study of impurity behavior in the TJ-II during externally induced radial electric fields. For this, different spectroscopic methods were employed, and the results obtained were compared to assess impurity behavior and to evaluate the effectiveness of such biasing on plasma confinement in TJ-II.
