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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.
C. Muirhead, H. Li, K. Pilatzke, M. Byers, R. Carson, H. Boniface, S. Suppiah
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 281-285
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290974
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) is developing a Proton Exchange Membrane-based (PEM) electrolyser intended for tritium removal. Commercially available Nafion® N-1110 membranes have been exposed to tritiated water (with a β activity of about 37 GBq/mL) prepared in the Tritium Facility at CNL. Three equivalent batches of Nafion® N-1110 membranes (each with a dimension of 4 cm × 4 cm) were exposed to β-doses of 67 kGy, 155 kGy, and 255 kGy, respectively.
The exposed membranes required decontamination for characterization and testing. A few different decontamination methods have been experimentally studied. These methods can be categorized as water elution and chemical soaking. The measured tritium concentration in eluent decreased quickly in the first 30 days of water elution, followed by a slow decay afterwards until reaching a plateau after about 100 days. Chemical soaking proved to be more effective than the water elution method and high temperature facilitated the tritium release.