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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.
K.-M. Song et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1010-1013
Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12587
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A calorimeter was integrated in KEPTL (KEPCO Research Institute Tritium Laboratory) and the various performance tests were performed. The inventory of tritium transport vessels delivered to the ITER tritium plant will be measured by calorimetry. For calorimetry measurement the tritium transport vessel will be inserted in an aluminum secondary container for the tritium leak prevention. The heat capacity and geometry of measuring objects, however, can affect the performance of the calorimeter such as measuring time, sensitivity, etc. In this study, the effect of the heat capacity of the tritium vessel on the performance of the twin cell calorimeter is studied by using JEC and aluminum container which are dummy vessels simulating the tritium decay heat with electric heaters. The average sensitivity in the test with aluminum containers is measured to be 96 V/mW which is similar that with JEC so it does not depend directly on the heat capacity of the tritium vessel. The aluminum container, however, makes the measuring time increase and the heat flow signal could be unstable in the range of low tritium and high heat capacity like a waste vessel after tritium loading out.