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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.
H. A. Boniface, N. V. Gnanapragasam, D. K. Ryland, S. Suppiah, A. Perevezentsev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 241-245
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290970
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Water Detritiation System (WDS) designed for ITER is based on the combined electrolysis and catalytic exchange(CECE) process to ensure the emission of tritium to the environment is maintained below very strict limits. The CECE process is one of the processes for tritium removal that CNL (Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, formerly Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.) has studied, developed and successfully demonstrated. In this work, CNL evaluated ITER’s design conditions of the exchange column and the electrolyser – the two key components of the CECE process (and the ITER WDS system) – to assess the effectiveness of tritium removal and investigate options to improve it. The evaluation was done using CNL’s CECE process simulation according to a protocol set out by ITER. Initially, calibration (benchmarking) of CNL’s hydrogen-water exchange column model was performed with a standard data set for a specified column to determine modeling parameters that resulted in a good match with the tritium concentration data. The model was then applied (with the same parameters) to the current WDS design. Some optimized conditions for the CECE process that could improve performance of the WDS to meet its design criteria were determined. The details of some of these assessments are presented here with particular attention to the WDS case where the feed water contains high levels of deuterium.
