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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.
N. Nunomura, S. Sunada, K. Watanabe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1155-1158
Blanket and Breeder Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Adsorption of H2O on the -Al2O3 (0001) surface was studied by means of a first-principles calculation based on density functional theory (DFT). We also investigated the behavior of the isotope exchange by substituting a protium atom with deuterium or tritium. The oxygen atom of H2O adsorbs on the Al atom of the outermost surface layer, the entire water molecule is slanted at the direction of a hollow site, and a molecular plane is nearly parallel to the surface. The adsorbed states are mostly due to coupling of lone-pair electrons of H2O with the empty p orbitals of the Al atom of surface. The behavior of dissociation for H2O is clarified from molecular dynamics simulations, indicating that the second neighbor oxygen atom is more preferable adsorption site for dissociation than the nearest neighbor oxygen atom on the surface.
