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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.
V. Philipps
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 119-125
Technical Paper | TEXTOR: Plasma-Wall Interactions | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A693
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proper wall conditioning has been a major element in the development of fusion energy on the way to achieve high fusion plasma performance. Various of these techniques have been pioneered in the TEXTOR tokamak and later applied successfully in various devices worldwide. The main issues are to clean the surface from surface-bounded impurities, to remove hydrogen, and to coat the entire wall surface with a thin film of a proper first-wall material. The main benefits of wall conditioning are to control the oxygen impurity content of the plasma and to offer a suitable first-wall material. Entire coating of the first wall has allowed one to control to some extent the recycling hydrogenic fluxes but in particular to study the complex coupling between the choice of wall materials and the behavior of the plasma edge. This paper presents a review of the different wall-conditioning methods used in TEXTOR and their effects on the plasma behavior. Also, new wall-conditioning concepts, compatible with steady-state magnetic fields, are outlined briefly.
