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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, Hitoshi Kubo, Yusuke Ohshima, Hiroshi Noguchi, Yuki Edao, Junichi Taniuchi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 596-600
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-921
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have developed two types of hydrophobic platinum honeycomb catalyst to be used for tritium oxidation reactors. One is the hydrophobic platinum catalyst on a metal honeycomb. The other is the hydrophobic platinum catalyst on a ceramic honeycomb made of silicon carbide. The activity of these catalysts was evaluated with tritium. The effects of hydrogen concentration (0.02 to 1000 ppm) and water concentration (100 or 22000 ppm) in the gaseous feed on the activity were investigated. The fine platinum particles around a few nanometers significantly improve the catalytic activity for the oxidation tritium at a very small concentration. The hydrogen concentration in the gaseous feed slightly affects the overall reaction rate constant for hydrogen oxidation. Due to the competitive adsorption of hydrogen and water molecules on platinum surface, the overall reaction rate constant has the bottom value at the hydrogen concentration of 100 ppm with the dry feed gas. We have experimentally confirmed the activity of these honeycomb catalysts is as good as that of granular hydrophobic catalyst. The results support the hydrophobic honeycomb catalysts can be used for tritium oxidation reactors.
