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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.
A. Abdrashitov et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 27-34
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A604
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the recent experiments, on-axis transverse beta exceeding 0.4 in the fast ion turning points near the end mirrors has been achieved in the GDT experiment with 4 MW injection of 15-17 keV deuterium neutral beams at the center of the device. Neither enhanced transverse losses of the plasma nor anomalies in the fast ion scattering and slowing down were observed. The measured beta value is close to that needed in the versions of the GDT-based 14 MeV neutron source. At the same time, the electron temperature for given injection power and pulse duration is limited to 100-130eV. Its further increase is planned after upgrade of the injection system and increase of the magnetic field at the center of device up to 0.3T. Upgrade of the injection system assumes that neutral beam power incident on to the plasma will be increased up to 9-10 MW and pulse duration is extended from 1.2 to 5 ms. According to the results of numerical simulations, for the extended pulse duration a plasma steady state will be achieved with electron temperature of 250-320 eV, depending upon the assumptions on the transverse energy loss rate. Future experiments on the GDT-upgrade are discussed in the paper.
