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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.
Y. U. Nam
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 180-184
Technical Paper | Seventh International Conference on Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A7009
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 280 GHz single-channel horizontal millimeter-wave interferometer system has been installed for plasma electron density measurements on the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR). An electron density of plasma is measured on double-path horizontal line with triangular geometry. A cassette system contains two vacuum windows was installed on median port for these purpose. Maximum line-integrated electron density of first plasma is set to 1019 m-2 in this geometry. Since a line density of single-fringe in 280 GHz is 2 × 1018 m-2, a multi-fringe counting circuit has been adopted for a fringe-jump compensation. Measured IF signals are divided into 4 channels which has fringe counting capability of 1, 2, 4 and 8 fringes, respectively. A phase difference between IF signals is converted to DC voltage in each channel according to its fringe coverage. A fringe-jump analysis algorism has been developed for a discrimination of real fringe-jump from noise signal. An electron density of the KSTAR first plasma has been measured and analyzed using this system. Upon these results, an advanced fringe counting scheme will be proposed in this paper.
