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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
Rie Kurata, Masayuki Yamada, Takumi Suzuki, Hirofumi Nakamura, Yasunori Iwai, Kanetsugu Isobe, Takumi Hayashi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 687-692
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290953
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium Process Laboratory (TPL) in Japan is operated by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) and was established as the only facility to handle over one gram of tritium in Japan in 1985. Since March 1988, the TPL has been operated safely with tritium, and no tritium release accidents have been occurred. The maximum tritium concentration of a three-month average in a stream from a stack of TPL to environment was 350 Bq/m3, and is about 14 times smaller than that of the legal release limit in Japan. The failure data have been analyzed for several main components of the safety systems such as pumps and monitors. The tritium waste data has also been accumulated as liquid and solid waste from TPL. Through this operating experience, a significant database for the safety systems of the TPL has been accumulated. This data can provide a source of reliability information for a future fusion facilities.
