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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.
Alexei D. Beklemishev, Peter A. Bagryansky, Maxim S. Chaschin, Elena I. Soldatkina
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 4 | May 2010 | Pages 351-360
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9497
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Interaction between shear flows and plasma instabilities in axially symmetric mirrors can lead to improved confinement, observed both in experiments on the gas dynamic trap and in simulations. Shear flows, driven via biased end plates and limiters, in combination with finite-larmor-radius effects are shown to be efficient in confining high-beta plasmas even with a magnetic hill on axis. Interpretation of observed effects such as vortex confinement, i.e., confinement of the plasma core in the dead-flow zone of the driven vortex, is shown to agree well with simulations. Theoretical scaling laws predict such a confinement scheme to be useful even in fusion plasmas.
