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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.
Yasunori Iwai, Katsumi Sato, Toshihiko Yamanishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 214-220
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-725
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have developed a honeycomb palladium catalyst to be used for the oxidation of tritiated hydrocarbons. Since the suitable loading rate of palladium deposited on the base material is a technical point, honeycomb-shaped palladium catalysts of three different loading rates—2, 5, and 10 g/L—were prepared to investigate the effect of loading rate of palladium on reaction rate in this study. Tritiated methane was selected as the typical hydrocarbon. A 12 m3 tank was prepared to prevent tritiated methane at tracer concentration fed to the catalytic reactor from fluctuating. The overall reaction rate constant for tritiated methane oxidation on the honeycomb palladium catalyst was determined with a flow-through system as a function of space velocity from 1000 to 6300 h−1, methane concentration in carrier from 0.004 to 100 ppm, and temperature of catalyst from 322 to 673 K. The honeycomb palladium catalyst without pretreatment for activation initially lowers the overall reaction rate constant at lower temperatures. However, the constant recovers steeply to the original value during the continuous combustion of tritiated methane. The loading rate of palladium deposited on the base material has little effect on reaction rate for tritiated methane combustion. The overall reaction rate constant is proportional to the space velocity. The overall reaction rate constant is independent on the methane concentration when it is less than 10 ppm.
