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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.
Yasushi Yamamoto, Mai Ichinose, Fumito Okino, Kazuyuki Noborio, Satoshi Konishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 558-562
Blanket Design and Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12442
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the design of the fusion blanket, it is important to gather generated tritium as quick as possible and supply them to a fuel supply system for keeping fuel cycle and reducing tritium inventories in the fusion reactor at the same time.In the advanced blanket concept which uses Lithium-Lead (LiPb) as the working fluid for heat removal, neutron shielding and tritium breeding, collection of generated tritium is thought not to be difficult as the solubility of hydrogen into the LiPb is small enough. But examination and design of these collecting systems was not fully studied.In this paper, we made the conceptual design of the tritium collecting device using vacuum sieve tray, and studied formation process of LiPb droplets by making a simple experimental device. It was found that droplets of about 0.9-mm radius were formed at 8~12-cm distance from nozzle when LiPb discharges from the nozzle with 1-mm diameter hole at pressure of 2.5×104 Pa. Using this value, it is estimated that the tritium collecting efficiency of 45% can be achieved with 1-m height single stage sieve tray at temperature of 500 °C.
