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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.
Satoshi Fukada, Shigeki Ono, Shigenori Suemori
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | July 2006 | Pages 99-106
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1225
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The overall mass-transfer process of methane decomposition on Ni surfaces and hydrogen permeation through a Ni tube was experimentally investigated to design a catalytic-permeable Ni tube reactor. This is a basic study of an impurity detritiation system to decompose tritiated methane and continuously recover tritium in a gas mixture exhausted from fusion plasma. The mass-transfer process was comparatively studied under the two conditions of an open Ni tube without any packing and a Ni tube packed with 200-240 mesh Ni particles. Results were discussed in terms of a CH4 decomposition ratio decomp and a H2 permeation ratio perm. The decomp values depended on temperature and were almost independent of the flow rate. The decomp value was correlated to the first-order reaction-rate constant. On the contrary, the perm values were in reverse proportion to the flow rate and were almost independent of temperature. The perm value was related to diffusion through a H2 concentration boundary layer formed in the vicinity of the Ni tube wall. The degradation of catalytic performance due to carbon deposition on Ni was discussed based on our experiments.