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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Ayano Nakamura, Kenzo Munakata, Keisuke Hara, Syodai Narita, Takahiko Sugiyama, Kenji Kotoh, Masahiro Tanaka, Tatsuhiko Uda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 499-502
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T64
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is necessary to recover or process tritiated species that are extensively coexistent in nuclear fusion installations. A conventional way to recover tritium release to atmosphere is catalytic oxidation of tritiated species and adsorption of tritated water vapor on adsorbents with high surface areas. However, pressure loss would become more serious with increase in the size of adsorbent beds, which could lead to greater power needs for ventilation systems. Therefore, new adsorbents with low pressure loss and high surface areas need to be developed and utilized for such large-scale adsorption systems. Thus, the authors tested new types of adsorbents, which are gear-type and honeycomb-type pellet adsorbents. The experimental results reveal that the gear-type pellet adsorbents have larger adsorption capacity than the honeycomb-type pellet adsorbent. It was also found that the gear-type MS4A adsorbent possesses larger adsorption capacity than other adsorbents tested in this work. Furthermore, it was found that new types of adsorbents are lower pressure than conventional-type of adsorbents. Among the new adsorbents studied in this work, the gear-type MS4A adsorbent appears to be most promising for the application to the adsorption systems in terms of adsorption capacity and adsorption rate.
