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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.
R. J. E. Jaspers
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 421-428
Diagnostics | Proceedings of the Ninth Carolus Magnus Summer School on Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9433
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A brief introduction into the spectroscopy of fusion plasmas is presented. Basic principles of the emission of ionic, atomic and molecular radiation is explained and a survey of the effects, which lead to the population of the respective excited levels, is given. Line radiation, continuum radiation, opacity and line broadening mechanisms are addressed. The instrumentation used on present day devices is shortly reviewed, with special attention to the active spectroscopic techniques of laser induced fluorescence and Thomson scattering.
