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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.
L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, D. Paige, ARIES Team, Z-Pinch Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 62-73
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-2
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The issue of radioactive waste management presents a top challenge for the nuclear industry. As an alternative to recycling or disposal in repositories, many countries are proceeding successfully with the process of developing clearance guidelines that allow solids and building rubble containing traces of radioisotopes to be cleared from regulatory control and unconditionally released to the commercial market after a specific storage period. With the emergence of new clearance standards, we took the initiative to compare U.S. to European and other international limits. This exercise is proving valuable in understanding the differences between the clearance standards and their implications for the radwaste management of fusion power plants. While clearance standards now exist for most radionuclides that are mainly important to the fission industry, no such standards are in place for many radionuclides of interest to fusion facilities. Before fusion penetrates the energy market, fusion-specific standards should be developed to address the safe release of fusion materials with trace levels of radioactive contamination.