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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.
T. D. Akhmetov et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 23-26
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A603
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental studies of a high- plasma in a long solenoid of the axisymmetric mirror trap AMBAL-M are being continued. In order to increase the density of the initial warm plasma generated by a plasma source, additional gas puffing was used. Optimization of gas puffing through a gas-box and reduction of magnetic field in the solenoid aimed at enhancement were performed. Another way of increasing consists in forming a small local mirror-trap in the solenoid where the plasma volume is much smaller than that of the whole solenoid plasma, and it is easier to achieve high -values. A preliminary result on the local-mirror-trap experiment is presented. Further steps on increase in the solenoid are proposed and discussed.
