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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Takuya Goto, Yuichi Ogawa, Akio Sagara, Shinsaku Imagawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 925-929
Power Plants, Demo, and Next Steps | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9028
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new empirical scaling of the magnetic field ratio (the maximum magnetic field on the coil to the toroidal field on the center of helical windings averaged over one field period) for heliotron/torsatron systems has been proposed. This new scaling was derived from the calculation result by using a finite-volume current element code over a wide range of coil engineering parameters. The scaling is described as a product of powers of 5 dimensionless parameters that relate to the coil geometry. This scaling can reproduce the magnetic field ratio within 3% error over the wide range of design parameters. By using this new scaling, we can estimate the magnetic field in the plasma confinement region by a fast calculation with engineering design parameters only. It will facilitate the design optimization through sensitivity analysis with parameter scan over a wide range in reactor design study of heliotron/torsatron reactors.
