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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.
Yoichi Sakuma et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 397-400
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There are three components which contain tritium in the air, i.e. water vapor, molecular hydrogen and methane. However, there is no tritium monitor, which is able to measure the concentration separately. In the light of it, we are developing a new monitor, which will be enable us to measure the tritium concentrations in two of these species, i.e. molecular hydrogen and methane. The specific activities of tritium in molecular hydrogen and in methane are very high. Then if we can collect the hydrogen and the methane, we will easily measure the tritium concentrations. We have conceptually designed a new tritium monitor and carried out several basic experiments. Based on the results of these experiments, we have estimated the performance of the monitor. For an hour counting, the monitor will be able to measure the tritium concentrations of molecular hydrogen and methane using about 4m3 air. Since the total performance of the monitor mainly depends on the capability of the proportional counter, we are developing an appropriate counter.
