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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
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.
M. Hirata et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 215-217
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A642
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Significant effects of sheared transverse electric fields in plasmas on both turbulent fluctuations and drift waves are experimentally demonstrated with improvement in plasma confinement for the first time in the tandem mirror GAMMA 10. Here, electron-cyclotron heatings (ECH) for ion-confining potential formation are applied in association with a significant rise in the absolute value of the central-cell potential and the resulting formation of a strong shear of electric fields of the order of 10 kV/m2 in the radial direction of the plasma column (dEr/dr). The central-cell line density increases during ECH in association with decreasing fluctuations. Various fluctuation diagnostics, in particular, the frequency analyses of end-loss ion currents and central soft x-ray brightness, show the consistent features. This encourages the usefulness of potentials and radial electric-field shear for confinement improvements.
