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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.
Zhilin Chen, Masao Matsuyama, Shinsuke Abe, Shuming Peng
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 461-467
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-151
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beta-induced X-ray spectrometry (BIXS) is a nondestructive method to detect tritium both on the surface and in the bulk of materials. The effects of internal bremsstrahlung (IB) from the beta decay of tritium on tritium profile reconstruction have been theoretically studied by numerical simulation based on Matlab code. Three kinds of samples, two polymers [(T-C4H6O2)n, Zeff = 6.4, homogeneous and heterogeneous] and one zirconium, with different tritium depth profiles were used in the calculations, and two of them were confirmed by experiments. The results indicate that the intensity of IB is comparable with external bremsstrahlung (EB) for low-Z materials, and the intensity of IB decreases a little faster than that of EB for the same material. Neglecting IB would lead to as much as 12% counts loss in tritium profile reconstruction for a polymer sample, and it is expected to be more serious for lower-Z materials such as beryllium and carbon fiber composites. The results also show that for the same material, the influence of IB depends on the depth profile of tritium in the sample.
