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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.
M. Zucchetti, I. Nicolotti, A. Ying, M. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 644-647
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-959
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
HCPB (Helium Cooled Pebbles Bed) Test Blanket Model (TBM) is based on solid breeder. Tritium has to be extracted using Helium purge gas flowing through breeder pebbles bed. He-stream must be cooled down and processed and all these steps are carried out in TES (Tritium Extraction System). A modeling work has been performed to study the behavior of the TES of the HCPB TBM and for Molecular Sieve 5A as adsorbent material. The result is the capability to model the extraction process of gaseous tritium compounds and to estimate the breakthrough curves of two main tritium gaseous species (H2 and HT).
