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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
W. Brian Clarke
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 122-127
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A253
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of lead vials of internal volume 1.0 cm3 were charged with ~200 mg of carbon catalyst containing 0.5% Pd and 0.4% Pd. The vials were clamped to stainless steel manifolds on a vacuum line, then pumped out and filled with high-purity H2 or D2 at a pressure of 152 cm Hg and a temperature of 23°C. Several vials contained ordinary activated carbon instead of palladium-carbon, and some vials contained only H2 or D2. All the vials were stored in a sandbox heated to ~200°C for times up to 45 days before mass spectrometer measurements of 3He and 4He were made. No evidence was found for the high concentrations of 4He claimed in similar experiments by several other researchers. The upper limit for the concentration excess of 4He in D2 in vials containing palladium-carbon is 11 ppt (parts per trillion) at the 95% confidence level. This limit for 4He may be compared with previous claims in similar experiments of 100 ppm (parts per million) by Case and 11 ppm by George and McKubre et al.