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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. Kotoh et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1355-1358
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12681
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Focusing on the behavior of hydrogen isotopes onto synthetic zeolites (SZ) at cryogenic temperatures such as liquefied nitrogen, we have been developing a system of pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process for hydrogen isotope separation applicable to fusion fuel processing, environmental tritium safety confinement or recovery of tritium from heavy water reactors. We have previously reported the experimental results of successive isotope separation and enrichment in a H2-D2 mixture by the PSA process using a single column packed with SZ-5A. In this work, a PSA experiment using SZ-13X was carried out in a similar way to the previous experiment for comparing the functional adsorbents. The result shows that the PSA process operation with SZ-13X can make the performance of heavier isotope enrichment with efficiency at a factor of near twice in comparison to the same operation with SZ-5A.
