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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.
David Carpenter, Michael Ames, Guiqiu Zheng, Gordon Kohse, Lin-wen Hu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 549-554
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1291040
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory (NRL) has irradiated lithium-beryllium fluoride (flibe) salt as part of an on-going U.S. Department of Energy-funded Integrated Research Project to develop a Fluoride Salt High-Temperature Reactor (FHR). As part of this project, the NRL has carried out two irradiations of FHR materials in static flibe at 700°C in the MIT Research Reactor. These irradiations marked the start of a program evaluating the tritium production and release from the fluoride salt system at high temperature; in particular, there is interest in the evolution of tritium from the salt into solid materials and cover gasses. This paper describes the experience gained from the irradiation of flibe with respect to the detection of tritium. It covers the development of techniques for monitoring the evolution of tritium from the salt during irradiation and the factors particular to the FHR system that influence this process, including the radiolytic production and release of volatile fluorine and fluoride products as a function of temperature. In addition, it discusses the measurement of tritium partitioning between the different materials in the experiment due to the confluence of diffusion, adsorption, and chemical and radiolytic reactions.
