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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
B. Bornschein et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 11-16
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Processing, Transportation, and Storage | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A870
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the design targets for the Tokamak Exhaust Processing (TEP) system of ITER is not to lose more than 10-5gh-1 into the Normal Vent Detritiation system of the Tritium Plant. The plasma exhaust gas therefore needs to be processed in a way that a tritium removal efficiency of about 108 with respect to the flow rate is achieved. Expressed in terms of tritium concentrations this corresponds to a decontamination from about 130 gm-3 down to about 10-4 gm-3 (about 1 Cim-3 = 3.7*1010 Bqm-3). The three step reference process for the TEP system of ITER is called CAPER and has been developed and realized at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). After the successful commissioning of the PERMCAT reactor as the key component of the third step detailed parametric tritium testing of the 3 steps involving the processing of more than 300 g tritium has been carried out and decontamination factors beyond the design requirements have been demonstrated for each process step and for the process as a whole. Not only the decontamination factor of 108 as required by ITER, but also the operational mode of TEP as a waste dump for gases from diverse sources has been experimentally validated with the CAPER facility.
