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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.
A. N. Perevezentsev, A. C. Bell, L. A. Rivkis, V. M. Filin, V. V. Gushin, M. I. Belyakov, V. I. Bulkin, I. G. Prykina, I. M. Kravchenko, A. A. Semenov, A. I. Davidov, S. P. Eliseev, D. V. Titov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 1 | July 2007 | Pages 84-99
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-16
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several methods of decontamination, such as melting, heating with flame, isotopic exchange with gaseous hydrogen, replacement with hydrogen, and thermal desorption under moist gas, were tested on stainless steel, INCONEL®, beryllium, copper, and aluminum bronze contaminated with tritium. The detritiation methods were assessed with respect to the fraction of the tritium inventory removed, the residual tritium concentration remaining, and the reduction in the rate of tritium outgassing. Potential applications of these decontamination methods include detritiation of the Joint European Torus (JET) vacuum vessel and the tritium plant prior to dismantling for decommissioning and subsequent processing of the intermediate-level waste this has generated.
