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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.
Carmen Varlam, Ioan Stefanescu, Ionut Faurescu, Nicolae Bidica, Irina Vagner, Denisa Faurescu, Diana Bogdan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 339-343
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1289451
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper presents the variation of tritium activity concentration in the environment of Experimental Pilot Plant for Tritium and Deuterium Separation (PESTD) over 6 years of observations. The tritium level was established in surface water, air, precipitation, home-grown vegetable, meat and milk. The yearly average tritium concentrations in air were slightly higher than values for the preoperational monitoring program. The values of tritium concentration in surface water and fresh products used for human consumption did not exceed 3 Bq/kg fresh weight. Nuclear activity of PESTD did not have any impact on the environment so far.
