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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.
Mariko Atarashi-Andoh, Yasuharu Kumakura, Hikaru Amano, Masami Fukui
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 771-774
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Biology, Health, and Radiation | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1034
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Potted rice plants were exposed to deuterated water vapor, as a substitute of tritium, for 4 hours at five different times during the grain-ripening period to estimate the influence of the growth stage on the formation and retention of organically bound deuterium (OBD) in rice. The plants were grown outside before and after the exposure experiments and were exposed to deuterated water vapor in a laboratory in a small chamber equipped with controllers of temperature, humidity and light intensity. Deuterium concentrations in free water and organic matter in rice leaves, stems and grains were investigated up to the harvest time. The deuterium in free water in the grains remained for a longer time after the end of exposure than in the leaves and stems. The mass of OBD in grain at harvest showed the highest value when the exposure was carried out in the early stage of the ripening period. When the exposure was carried out after 26 days from the heading, the increase of OBD in the grain was small.