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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Beate Bornschein, Uwe Besserer, Markus Steidl, Michael Sturm, Kathrin Valerius, Jürgen Wendel, KATRIN Collaboration
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 231-235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
By an international collaboration the KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino experiment KATRIN is currently being installed and commissioned at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the site selection that makes sure of the unique expertise and infrastructure of Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). KATRIN requires a strong windowless gaseous source of almost pure molecular tritium (95%) and a throughput of 40 g tritium (1.5·1016 Bq) per day, stabilized to the 0.1% level. Since the last large components have been delivered in summer 2015, the collaboration is now focusing on the commissioning of the whole KATRIN experiment. A particular challenge is the commissioning with tritium, which will mark the point of no return regarding the contamination of the large magnet cryostats and tritium loop components. We have developed a 5-phase plan that covers all necessary work to be done for the safe and reliable standard tritium operation of KATRIN.
