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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.
W. Biel, TEXTOR Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 246-252
Technical Paper | TEXTOR: Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Spectroscopy in fusion experiments is an important tool to identify impurities in the plasma and to analyze their properties based on the measurement of their characteristic line radiation. For the temperature range typical in fusion plasmas, the dominant part of each impurity in the plasma is highly ionized, and its most intense spectral lines radiate in the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) wavelength range (10 to 200 nm). The VUV overview spectrometers installed at TEXTOR working at moderate resolution allow one to identify intrinsic plasma impurities such as B (Z = 5), C (Z = 6), Fe (Z = 26), and Cu (Z = 29) as well as seeded impurities such as Ne (Z = 10) and Ar (Z = 18) and to derive information on their relative densities in the plasma. Optimizing these spectrometers for high time resolution provides a tool to analyze transient phenomena like impurity transport processes. In combination with impurity transport modeling and atomic data, the radial distribution of the radial diffusion coefficient is determined from the experimental data. For the case of ohmic discharges, the effective radial diffusion coefficient is found to be anomalously enhanced by more than one order of magnitude as compared to neoclassical predictions.