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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.
M. Zucchetti, A. Ciampichetti
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 814-818
Safety and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST56-814
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ignitor is a nuclear fusion experiment aimed at studying Deuterium-Tritium plasmas. If European proposed waste management strategies were applied, all Ignitor radioactive materials could be recycled or declassified to non-radioactive material. We have applied the Italian waste management regulations to the IGNITOR experiment radioactive materials: none of them should be classified in the High Level Waste category but the vessel, and most materials are classified as LLW (Low Level Waste). The machine has very low radiological risks and environmental impact.
