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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.
T. Kawano, T. Uda, T. Yamamoto, H. Ohashi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 952-955
Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12573
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For measuring the tritium concentration in water, a water monitoring system was developed. The monitoring system consists of a flow-cell detector, a pair of photomultiplier tubes, a circuit unit (including a high-voltage power supply and a coincidence counting module), a water flow pump and a multichannel pulse height analyzer. The flow-cell detector was fabricated using granular CaF2(Eu), which was solid scintillation materials. The performance of the water monitoring system was examined with three water samples containing different tritium concentrations of 10, 50 and 100 Bq/ml, and linearity between the count rate and the tritium concentration was examined. The results suggest that our system reasonably works as a water monitor for measuring low level tritium concentration. This system is the first such real-time monitoring system able to measure tritium concentrations in water continuously flowing through the solid scintillation detector.
