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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.
V. D’Auria, S. Dulla, P. Ravetto, L. Savoldi, M. Utili, R. Zanino
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 537-543
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1291252
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current studies on the development of the EU DEMO breeding blanket include among the options the use of liquid Lithium-Lead (17Li-83Pb) as tritium breeder (and multiplier), with different coolants. As the tritium is steadily produced in the blanket during the reactor operation, suitably efficient strategies for the Tritium Extraction System (TES) from the breeder must be developed, allowing a closed fuel cycle in situ and avoiding tritium accumulation in the machine. The Permeator Against Vacuum (PAV) appears to be one of the most promising solutions to achieve this goal. In this paper, the performance of a PAV system is studied by means of different models describing the transport of tritium in the liquid PbLi and in the metallic membrane separating it from the vacuum. The comparison of the results for different membrane materials and size of the device, for a given target efficiency, allows to optimize the PAV design, also taking into account corrosion issues. The approximations and limitations of the adopted models are also addressed.
