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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.
H. R. Koslowski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 260-265
Technical Paper | TEXTOR: Other Research Areas | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A705
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The analysis of Faraday rotation measurements shows that the safety factor on the magnetic axis stays well below one during the full sawtooth cycle.The current density profile has a unique shape during the sawtoothing plateau phase of ohmic discharges, independent of plasma current and magnetic field, when it is plotted in suitable normalized coordinates.The observation of short lasting spikes on the Faraday rotation signals can be interpreted as the formation of a transient current sheet during the sawtooth crash.Direct measurements of the magnetic amplitude of the internal kink mode with a fast polarimeter channel show that the displacement of the core because of the growing precursor mode stays much smaller than the q = 1 radius just prior to the sawtooth collapse.The versatile neutral beam heating system on Tokamak EXperiment for Technology Oriented Research (TEXTOR) allows the study of the influence of the plasma rotation on the sawtooth period, which has a minimum when the magnetohydrodynamic rotation in the tokamak frame is stopped.
