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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.
Robert H. Hsu, James E. Klein
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 83-87
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Processing, Transportation, and Storage | doi.org/10.13182/FST48-83
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Palladium finely dispersed in a substrate of kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) has been successfully used for tritium storage, separation and pumping for a number of years at the Savannah River Site (SRS). Recently SRS has designed and built a new Pd/kieselguhr flow through bed (FTB) prototype for separating tritium from other gases and simultaneously storing the tritium on palladium. The FTB prototype uses single-pass liquid nitrogen for cooling during tritium absorption/loading/storage and electrical heaters for desorption/unloading of tritium. Fourteen (14) hydrogen absorption/desorption or loading/unloading cycles have been conducted with the new FTB prototype. Test results show that all design performance objectives have been successfully achieved: recover >95% of hydrogen gas from feed gas, <5% hydrogen in discharge gas, and >99.9% hydrogen in the desorbed product gas. This paper will discuss the design and operation of the FTB, and results of performance tests such as separation efficiency, hydrogen/tritium storage capacity and temperature profiles during prep cooling, hydrogen loading and unloading.
