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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.
Kazunari Katayama, Satoshi Fukada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 426-431
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1293412
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the aim of developing a method for the recovery of tritium from tritium-bearing hydrocarbons, it was shown experimentally that methane can be decomposed directly into hydrogen and carbon in RF plasmas via reactions initiated by electrons. Measurements performed with CH4 and CH3T in a helium RF plasma indicate that the degree of decomposition of CH3T is substantially smaller than that of CH4. This is considered to be caused by a very low concentration of CH3T. It was found that a majority of tritium dissociated from CH3T is retained in the plasma reactor. However, a certain amount of retained tritium could be removed by a discharge-cleaning of oxygen.