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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.
Florian Priester
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 600-604
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1289585
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This technical note describes advances in the activity measurement of tritiated water with the method of scintillation counting in a solid fibre. The device described can be installed inline thus enabling the monitoring of a process without the need for taking samples. Due to the low overall costs, the system can be installed at various positions in a larger plant adding additional safety and better control over the process. The current technical note on the TRAMPEL setup (TRitium Activity Monitoring with a PhotomultipliEr in Liquids) focuses on the updates and enhanced detection limits due to an updated readout and DAQ system. It is now possible to measure inline down to activity concentrations of 104 Bq/ml, which is roughly one order of magnitude lower than previously reported. A possible memory effect as well as the influence of the filling level was investigated. All measurements were performed with a standalone (non-inline) cell but can be applied for a flow-through application, too.
