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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.
K. Masaki, J. Yagyu, T. Arai, A. Kaminaga, K. Kodama, N. Miya, T. Ando, H. Hiratsuka, M. Saidoh
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 2 | September-November 2002 | Pages 386-395
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A235
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
JT-60U has a variety of wall-conditioning methods such as baking of the vacuum vessel, helium Taylor discharge cleaning, helium glow discharge cleaning, tokamak discharge cleaning, and boronization. Using these wall-conditioning methods, the high-power operation of JT-60U has been successfully carried out with the carbon-based first wall. The material behavior of the carbon-based first wall has been investigated, and important knowledge was obtained on mechanical engineering and plasma surface interactions. In order to understand the tritium behavior in JT-60U, tritium retention in the first wall and tritium exhausted through the pumping system were measured. These results yield useful information on the tritium behavior in a future DT fusion machine.
