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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.
Yoshitaka Yoneda et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 122-126
Technical Paper | Seventh International Conference on Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A6996
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Refueling by hydrogen ice pellet injection has been studied in various plasmas. The research of pellet ablation related to refueling is very important object. In the central-cell plasma of tandem mirror GAMMA 10, we measured the position of pellet ablation by vertical and horizontal arrays of H detectors and a high-speed CMOS camera. We found that the penetration depths with applying electron cyclotron heating (ECH) is shorter than that without ECH. It suggests that the pellet ablation is strongly affected by warm electrons produced with ECH. Moreover, we investigated the effects of neutral beam injection (NBI) to the pellet ablation, which showed the pellet ablation in the situation of higher density plasma. The pellets penetrate through the plasma without applying ECH or NBI. We observed the pellet ablation at each position by using vertical and horizontal arrays of H detectors and a high-speed CMOS camera with the interference filter.
