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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.
S. Krupakar Murali, J. F. Santarius, G. L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 3 | April 2010 | Pages 281-291
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9471
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial electrostatic confinement devices can generate secondary, thermionic, photo, and field emission electrons from the cathode grid, which is a drain on the system. Of the various electron emission contributions, methods to study and minimize the thermionic emission current are explored in this paper using a new diagnostic called "chordwire" - wire placed in the form of a chord of a circle inside the cathode that intercepts particles. This chordwire intercepts particles and gets heated; the rise in temperature can be monitored externally using a pyrometer. Local power balance on the chordwires can then be used to infer the particle flux reaching the chordwires. This diagnostic helps show that to accurately estimate the ion current reaching the central grid, the thermionic electron emission has to be taken into account. The thermionic emission could become significant even for low power operation (<10 kW) in the presence of asymmetric grid heating. The asymmetric grid heating can be mitigated by homogenizing the ionization source around the chamber. The ion-recirculation current equation has been updated to accommodate the thermionic emission current. This ion-recirculation current equation shows that while the electron current increases nonlinearly with the power-supply current (when the grid is thermionically active for input power that is >10 kW), the ion current increases only in a less-than-linear fashion. Hence, the scaling of the fusion productivity with the power-supply current appears to be less than linear. Material selection and device operation should be aimed at reducing this electron energy drain for optimum performance. The overall thermionic emission from the cathode could be reduced through the selection of appropriate grid material with high work function (e.g., Re and W-25%Re). Moreover, this material also has lower sputter yield relative to Type 304 stainless steel, thus helping in high-voltage operation of the device.