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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.
C. Fagan, M. Sharpe, W. T. Shmayda, W. U. Schröder
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 275-280
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1293456
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The concentration of tritium in the adsorbed water layer on stainless-steel type 316 is notably higher than that present in the metal lattice. The absorbed waters play a key role in the migration of tritium into the metal. In this work, stainless-steel (type 316) surfaces were subjected to various pretreatments designed to alter the surface in order to probe the relation between surface conditions and total tritium inventories. These pretreatments included electropolishing and soaking in nitric-acid baths. Stainless-steel samples were loaded with tritium by exposure to a deuterium–tritium gas mixture at 25°C for 24 h. Total tritium inventories were measured using temperature-programmed desorption. The thermal desorption data show a reduction of 65% in total tritium inventory by electropolishing stainless-steel surfaces as compared to unmodified samples. It is also shown that treating the surfaces with nitric acid resulted in an increase in the tritium content by ~200%.
