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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.
T. Loarer et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 306-309
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Handling Facilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A933
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of 39 consecutive and repetitive discharges (Ip = 2MA, BT = 2.4T, <ne> = 3.8 × 1019m-3, gas rate ~1.5 × 1022 Ds-1 and with 2.8 MW of ICRH over a duration of 11s) has been performed in JET for a full day in order to study the particle retention behaviour as a function of the wall inventory and the global balance for a significant number of discharges associated to a high gas injection. Since the active pumping was achieved using the divertor cryopump only, its regeneration has allowed a direct calibration of the value of the pumped particle flux to be used in the particle balance analysis during the plasma operations for the "DOC-L" configuration. Taking into account the outgased flux between the discharges, the resulting wall inventory over the full day of operation is zero. During, the 11 sec of the ICRH power, about 8 % of the particles injected are retained in the machine equilibrated by a particle recovery between of 8% of the quantity injected. This shows that the gas released between pulses has been overestimated in previous JET gas balance analysis and that the particles trapped in the machine are localised in areas which are outgasing between the discharges.
