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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.
Hilary Phillips, Edwin Privas, Julian Dean
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 523-526
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T70
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear plant operators (power generation, decommissioning and reprocessing operations) are required to monitor releases of tritium species for regulatory compliance and radiation protection purposes. Tritium monitoring is performed using tritium-in-air gas monitoring instrumentation based either on flow-through ion chambers or proportional counting systems. Tritium-in-air monitors are typically calibrated in dry conditions but in service may operate at elevated levels of relative humidity. The NPL radioactive gas-in-air calibration system has been used to study the effect of humidity on the response to tritium of two tritium-in-air ion chamber based monitors and one proportional counting system which uses a P10/air gas mixture. The response of these instruments to HTO vapour has also been evaluated. In each case, instrument responses were obtained for HT in dry conditions (RH ~2%), HT in 45% Relative Humidity (RH), and finally HTO at 45% RH. Instrumentation response to HT in humid conditions has been found to slightly exceed that in dry conditions.
