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September 8–11, 2025
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.
Marius Zamfirache, Anisia Bornea, Ioan Stefanescu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 590-594
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273698
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ICSI Rm. Valcea is the leading research institute involved in the Romanian heavy water detrititiation program. ICSI has built a Tritium Removal Facility which is an experimental pilot plant for deuterium and tritium separation - its main objectives being to demonstrate detritiation technology followed by implementation at the CANDU nuclear power plant in Cernavoda.
Within isotope separation installations using a cryogenic distillation process, the required gas purity must be high to avoid the risk of impurity condensation. A preferred and recommended purification process is solidifying impurities over a large material area heat exchanger device. Such a system is usually a regenerative type to ensure continuous operation. Gas Purification is achieved either by means of reversible heat exchangers or thermal regenerators.
Reversible exchangers and regenerators have a periodic operation, a warm period and a cold period. During the warm period, the heat exchanger or regenerator mass heat up cooling the purified gas, while in the cold period, the cold waste gas heat up the exchanger or the regenerator.
Essentially, the impurity solidification purification process is the same for both the reversible exchanger and regenerator, but because of their differences the process description will be different and so also the design method. Due to periodic operation of a regenerative system the process is unsteady, its description utilizing highly complex mathematics. For this reason it is of particular interest to have a very well developed mathematical description of non-stationary heat exchange processes, incorporating simultaneous mass and heat exchange processes taking place in the regenerative systems.
This paper presents a conceptual scheme of a purification unit consisting of two stages (the first being a drying system followed by an advanced cryogenic purification). A theoretical analysis of the second stage of the process will be developed. Due to cyclic operation (cooling, retention, cleaning) the process is carried-out in the non-stationary regime, thus the mathematical description is complex but needed to design such a system.
Also presented is a theoretical analysis of the purification of an impurity-laden gas, using the calculation model developed with the proposed regenerative system.
