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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.
Viorel Fugaru, Cristian Postolache, Maria Gheorghe, Lidia Radu, Nastasia Saca
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 286-289
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1293444
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The study was conducted in order to determine the immobilization performance of low-level tritium waste in new cement mixtures. The grouts analyzed are fine mortars, fluid, self- compacting, with flowability, able to fill the smallest gaps in the solid waste container. The grouts curing showed compact and structural integrity without pores and cracks, so as to ensure radioactive tritium waste encapsulation.
Two types of solid/liquid tritium radioactive waste with known tritium activity have been prepared: one type containing a hydrophilic tritium compound and the other one a hydrophobic tritium compound.
The tritium waste was mixed with three different types of grout and poured in a cylindrical mould. The leaching of tritium from waste solidified/encapsulated in the cement mixtures immersed in an aqueous environment has been studied in order to select the most appropriate grout type as waste immobilization matrix.
Samples from the liquid surrounding the cements blocks were collected at predetermined time intervals and placed in the liquid scintillation cocktail and measured. The activity of the tritium released was then calculated.
