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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. Sharpe, W. T. Shmayda, W. U. Schröder
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 1 | July 2016 | Pages 97-111
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-198
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The migration of tritium to the surfaces of Aluminum 6061; oxygen-free, high-conductivity copper; and Type 316 stainless steel from the bulk metal was studied using low-pressure Tonks-Langmuir argon plasma. The plasma is shown to be effective at removing tritium from metal surfaces in a controlled manner. Tritium is removed in decreasing quantities with successive plasma exposures, which suggests a depletion of the surface and near-surface-tritium inventories.
A diffusion model was developed to predict tritium migration from the bulk and its accumulation in the water layers present on the metal surface. The model reproduces the rate of tritium regrowth on the surface for all three metals and can be used to calculate the triton solubility in the water layers present on metal surfaces. The ratio of surface-to-bulk solubilities at the water layer–bulk metal interface uniquely determines the concentration ratio between these two media. Removing the tritium-rich water layers induces tritium to migrate from the bulk to the surface. This process is driven by a concentration gradient that develops in the bulk because of the perturbation on the surface.
