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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.
A. A. Ivanov, A. D. Beklemishev, E. P. Kruglyakov, P. A. Bagryansky, A. A. Lizunov, V. V. Maximov, S. V. Murakhtin, V. V. Prikhodko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 4 | May 2010 | Pages 320-325
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9493
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The status of the experiments on the axially symmetric magnetic mirror device gas dynamic trap (GDT) is discussed. The plasma has been heated by skewed injection of 20-keV, 3.5-MW, 5-ms deuterium/hydrogen neutral beams at the center of the device, which produces anisotropic fast ions. Neither enhanced transverse losses of the plasma nor anomalies in the fast ion scattering and slowing down were observed. Extension of neutral beam injection pulse duration from 1 to 5 ms resulted in an increase in the on-axis transverse beta (ratio of the transverse plasma pressure to magnetic field pressure) from 0.4 at the fast ion turning points near the end mirrors to about 0.6. The measured beta value is rather close to or even higher than that expected in different versions of the GDT-based 14-MeV neutron source for fusion materials testing. The density of fast ions with the mean energy of 10 to 12 keV reached 5 × 1019 m-3 near the turning points. The electron temperature at the same time reached [approximate]200 eV. The radial plasma losses were suppressed by sheared plasma rotation in the periphery driven by biasing of end wall segments and the radial limiter in the central solenoid.
