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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.
M. Gasparotto et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 339-344
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A714
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The WENDELSTEIN 7-X stellarator (W7-X) is the next step device in the stellarator line of IPP and is presently under construction at the Greifswald branch institute. The experiment aims at demonstrating the steady state capability of a stellarator machine at reactor relevant parameters. An important feature of W7-X is the high geometrical accuracy of the magnetic configuration which implies tight tolerances in the construction and assembly phases. The magnetic system consists of 50 non planar and 20 planar superconducting coils. Critical components are the coil support elements connecting the coil to the central mechanical structure and the inter-coil elements connecting the coils one to the other. Efficient thermal insulation of the superconducting coils is achieved by high vacuum and multi-layer insulation. The plasma vessel is composed of 10 half-modules welded together during the assembly phase. A 10 MW ECRH system with CW-capability operation at 140 GHz is required to meet the scientific objective of W7-X.The paper will report the recent progress on W7-X with particular emphasis on the components where high technology solutions have been applied.