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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.
M. Tanaka, T. Sugiyama, T. Ohshima, I. Yamamoto
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1391-1394
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12690
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To develop a tritium monitoring system with a membrane gas separator, the extraction characteristics of a hydrogen isotope pump using CaZr0.9In0.1O3- as proton conductor were evaluated over the temperature range from 873 K to 1073 K by electrolysis of tritiated water vapor. Although the isotope ratio between proton and tritium in the anode compartment was extremely low, tritium gas (HT) could be extracted along with hydrogen gas (H2) to the cathode compartment by the electrochemical hydrogen pump. The T/H isotope ratio in the cathode compartment was lower than that in the anode compartment because of the isotope effect in the hydrogen pump. However, when the hydrogen recovery rate increased, the ratio of hydrogen isotopes approached unity, which might be caused by variation in the T/H ratio along the axial direction. With respect to the tritium memory effect in the proton conductor, the isotope exchange reaction using wet gas was found to be an efficient method for tritium decontamination.
