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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.
L. K. Heung, H. T. Sessions, X. Xiao, H. L. Mentzer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 4 | November 2009 | Pages 1471-1475
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-29
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first generation of a hydrogen isotope separation process called the thermal cycling absorption process (TCAP) has been in service for tritium separation at the Savannah River Site since 1994. To prepare for replacement, a next-generation TCAP process has been developed. This new process simplifies the column design and reduces the equipment requirements of the thermal cycling system. An experimental 12-m column was fabricated and installed in the laboratory to demonstrate its performance. This new design and its initial test results were presented at the Eighth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology and are published in the proceedings, Fusion Sci. Technol., Vol. 54, No. 2, p. 399 (2008). We have since completed the start-up and demonstrated the separation of protium and deuterium in the experimental unit. The unit has been operated for more than 200 cycles. A feed of 25% deuterium in protium was separated into two streams, each with better than 99.7% purity.
