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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.
S. V. Polosatkin et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 179-182
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A634
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thomson scattering system for measurements of radial profile of plasma density (range 0.5-5×1021 m-3) with temperature up to 2 keV was developed at the GOL-3 facility. First harmonics (=1.06 m) of Nd glass laser is used. Scattered light from different points of plasma cross-section is imaged to a set of quartz optical fibers and detected by avalanche photodiodes.During the first 10 s after start of the relativistic electron beam injection the intense light emission from plasma is observed. Single powerful laser pulse is used for providing of good signal-noise ratio in this period. Later the plasma radiation intensity decreases and the less powerful laser oscillator operated in multiple-pulsed regime is used.Description of the diagnostics, methodical aspects of operation, and results of the density dynamics measurements are presented in the paper.
