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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.
L. El-Guebaly, M. Zucchetti
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 484-491
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The importance of handling the sizable mildly radioactive materials that fusion generates received more attention in recent years. Disposing such sizable radwaste in geologic repositories is not a viable option. We suggest changing what is now a costly waste disposal concern for fusion energy into a valued commodity through the further development of the recycling and clearance approaches. This paper reports the outcome of two recent activities that identified the challenges of handling the radioactive materials of ARIES-ACT-2 power plant along with the required design changes and R&D programs that make the recycling/clearance approach a reality, and the development of a new detritiation code that predicts the efficiency of tritium recovery from metallic materials – an essential process before recycling.
