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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.
J. E. Klein, P. J. Foster
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 964-967
Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12576
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A PAssively Cooled, Electrically heated hydride (PACE) Bed has been deployed into tritium service in the Savannah River Site (SRS) Tritium Facilities. The bed design, absorption and desorption performance, and cold (non-radioactive) in-bed accountability (IBA) results have been reported previously. Six PACE Beds were fitted with instrumentation to perform the steady-state, flowing gas calorimetric inventory method. An IBA inventory calibration curve, flowing gas temperature rise (T) versus simulated or actual tritium loading, was generated for each bed. Results for non-radioactive (“cold”) tests using the internal electric heaters and tritium calibration results are presented.Changes in vacuum jacket pressure significantly impact measured IBA T values. Higher jacket pressures produce lower IBA T values which underestimate bed tritium inventories. The exhaust pressure of the IBA gas flow through the bed's U-tube has little influence on measured IBA T values, but larger gas flows reduce the time to reach steady-state conditions and produce smaller tritium measurement uncertainties.
