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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.
T. D. Akhmetov et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 167-170
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A631
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The central solenoid of AMBAL-M was filled with a turbulent plasma stream generated by a source located outside the entrance magnetic throat, the plasma ~0.4 m in diameter, with density ~1.51013 cm-3, electron temperature ~50 eV and ion energy ~200 eV was obtained.Additional hydrogen puffing allowed plasma density increase. The plasma with a cold component from ionized gas and charge exchange ions was heated by electrostatic oscillations produced by the working source. At optimized gas puffing the plasma density was increased to 51013 cm-3 without substantial reduction of the ion temperature. No big differences in plasma properties were found between gas puffing through a gas-box and a ceramic tube.The plasma density increment was shown to depend only on the total amount of the injected gas. The experimental optimization was made for different values of solenoid magnetic field taking the diamagnetism into account.Neutral hydrogen distribution in the solenoid vacuum chamber and recycling rate were estimated from data of fast inverse magnetron gauges constructed in BINP.
