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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
M. Zucchetti, L. Di Pace, L. El-Guebaly, B. N. Kolbasov, V. Massaut, R. Pampin, P. Wilson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 781-788
Safety and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9004
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to maximize the environmental benefits of fusion power generation, it is important to clearly define the parameters governing the back-end of the materials cycle. A fusion-specific approach is necessary and needs to be developed. Recycling of materials and clearance (i.e. declassification to non-radioactive material) are the two recommended options for reducing the amount of fusion waste, while the disposal as low-level waste could be an alternative route for specific materials and components. Both recycling and clearance criteria have been recently revised by national and international institutions. These revisions and their consequences for fusion material management are examined in this paper.It is also important to define the various processes and routes to avoid generating active waste from fusion as much as possible. Two ways are explored within the fusion community: first, the development of materials leading to low activation levels, avoiding the generation of long lived radionuclides through a strict control of the impurity content in materials; second, the development of suitable and reliable processes allowing either clearance of as much material as possible (potentially after adequate treatment) or recycling most of the remaining materials within the nuclear industry.