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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.
R. Lässer, D. K. Murdoch, M. Glugla
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 337-342
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A938
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Unexpectedly large tritium amounts were trapped in the Plasma Facing Components of JET and TFTR during the respective tritium campaigns. Newly created co-deposited layers of carbon and hydrogen were identified as the main sinks. The first wall of ITER in contrast to JET and TFTR will be covered with beryllium, whereas the divertor tiles will be built of tungsten with the exception of a relatively small area of carbon fibre composites. Due to these three materials the composition of the newly created layers will change as a function of plasma operation. Their possible hydrogen content is not known yet and as a consequence the estimates of potentially trapped tritium differ strongly. To respect safety limits measurements of the mobilisable tritium inventories inside the vacuum vessel are required. The present strategy is to rely on the accountancy of the accessible tritium inside the fuel cycle and to derive the quantity of tritium trapped inside the vessel by difference. The tritium injected into the machine is only measured by mass flow meters and no effort is made to determine the tritium exhausted.Enhancements to determine the tritium and deuterium amounts injected into the torus and first proposals for enabling accountancy of the tritium and deuterium released from the torus cryo-pumps on a shot-by-shot basis are given. Only few additional buffer volumes and a micro gas chromatograph are required as the solutions are simple and inexpensive. These tools could be used already in the H-phase of ITER to obtain an integral value of the hydrogen trapped in the co-deposited layers by simple addition of small concentrations of deuterium to the protium and measuring the injected and released deuterium amounts.