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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.
J. H. Jeong, S. Park, H. J. Do, W. Namkung, M. H. Cho, Y. S. Bae, M. Joung, W. S. Han, J. S. Kim, S. J. An, H. L. Yang, S. Kubo, H. Takahashi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 3 | April 2010 | Pages 274-280
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to transmit a wave efficiently in an electron cyclotron heating (ECH) system, it is important to suppress mode conversion loss caused by coupling in the matching optics unit and misalignment in the transmission line. To understand the cause of mode conversion loss, it is necessary to analyze the mode content in an oversized circular corrugated waveguide. For mode analysis of the propagating wave in the corrugated waveguide, several methods based on the phase-retrieval process and the iterative process are suggested. But, in the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research 84-GHz ECH transmission line, a well-known method using burn patterns was used for better coupling of the output beam from the gyrotron onto the axis of the corrugated waveguide by adjusting a large ellipsoidal mirror in an L-shaped chamber, a so-called L-box. During the adjustment of the mirror in the L-box, evidence of the existence of higher modes other than HE11 was found. For the mode content study, the radiation intensity distribution was measured using thermal paper as a function of the distance along the waveguide at a high power level. The mode content of the wave was estimated by comparing the measured burn patterns and calculated patterns at different locations. This paper describes the results of mode content estimation using burn pattern images as a function of the mode mixture ratio.
