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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.
Ion Cristescu, A. Bükki-Deme, R. Carr, N. Gramlich, R. Groessle, C. Melzer, P. Schaefer, Stefan Welte
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 225-230
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1288057
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The design of ITER tritium processing systems will benefit from experimental data and process validation based on experimental facilities that are ITER scale relevant. Several rigs and experimental facilities have been enhanced and developed at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK) in order to explore a wide range of envisaged scenarios of tritium plant systems, such as the Water Detritiation System (WDS), Isotope Separation System (ISS) and highly tritiated water processing. In the last few years, detailed experimental investigations and process modeling have been conducted in relation to the Combined Electrolysis Catalytic Exchange and Isotope Separation (CECE-ISS) systems which were focused on evaluation of the impact of deuterium build-up and accumulation in the CECE system. An enhanced configuration of the ITER WDS has been developed, that allows mitigation of the effects due to deuterium accumulation and reduction of the tritium inventory within the electrolysis system. In addition, the benefits concerning the interface between the WDS and ISS are presented. Significant efforts have been made to enhance the simulation tool TRIMO++ that was calibrated against the experimental results collected from the experimental rigs. The new features of the simulation tools are introduced as well.
The main references of a new method aiming to mitigate the tritium permeation from the tritium processes streams into the non-contaminated streams such as steam generators are introduced. The reference configuration of first phase of the experimental rigs and the preliminary experimental activities are presented as well.