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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.
Brian L. Ellis, H. Fritzsche, J. Patel, J. Lang, S. Suppiah
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 660-665
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium betavoltaics are one of the family of nuclear batteries which convert natural radioactive decay from a radioisotope into electricity that can provide continuous power without the requirement for replacement or recharging. Tritium is ideally suited to this application due to its high specific activity, low shielding requirements and relatively high availability. Owing to safety and environmental concerns over tritium leakage, metal tritides films are preferred as tritium betavoltaic sources. Titanium hydride and deuteride films were studied as analogues to titanium tritide films. The quality of the films depended on the temperature of hydrogen loading as films loaded at elevated temperatures (>100 °C) were brittle and delaminated from the semiconductor substrate while those exposed to hydrogen at room temperature continued to adhere to the substrate. For the latter films, evidence of hydrogen isotope loss was observed when left under ambient conditions over the course of a few weeks.