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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.
N. Putvinskaya et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 806-813
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Plasma Engineering, Heating, Current Drive, and Control | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A786
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The industrial developments in the fusion industry will have to overcome numerous technical challenges and will have a strong need for modern information technology (IT) systems.The fusion industry has manifested itself with an unprecedented international collaboration, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Data accumulated in ITER will be the major output of the project and will create the knowledge base for a future fusion power plant. A modern and effective information infrastructure will be critical to the success of the ITER project.To accumulate and maintain the knowledge base at all stages of the project, we propose to build an integrated information system for ITER: ITER Information Plant (IIP). IIP will minimize lost experiment time and accelerate the understanding, interpretation, and planning of fusion experiments. IIP will allow to reap maximum benefits from the project's scientific and technological achievements, make the ITER results accessible to hundreds of researchers worldwide. This will facilitate collaboration, dramatically increasing the pace of scientific and technological discovery and the rate at which practical use is made of these discoveries.As the first of its kind, the ITER Information Plant could be used in the future as a prototype IT system for national and international fusion projects, in which multicountry collaboration, distributed work sites and operations are catalysts for success.