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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.
R. Scott Willms, David Dogruel, Richard Myers, Richard Farrell
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 409-412
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A955
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Traditionally the amount of tritium on a surface is determined by swiping the surface with a material such as filter paper and counting the removed tritium by scintillation. While effective, this method can be time consuming, can alter the surface, only measures removable tritium and produces radioactive waste. For a given application each of these considerations may or may not be a disadvantage. A solid state monitor, on the other hand, has the potential to provide rapid analysis, not alter the surface, measure all tritium on a surface and produce little or not radioactive waste. This allure has promoted open wall ion chamber and PIN diode-based tritium surface monitor development, and these techniques have enjoyed certain success. Recently the first tests were performed with an avalanche photodiode (APD) for surface tritium measurement. While quite similar in concept to PIN diode based measurements, side-by-side testing showed that the APD provided substantially better counting efficiency. Considerations included count rate, background, sensitivity, stability and effect of ambient light. Of particular importance in the US, the APD was able to measure concentrations down to the "free release" limit, i.e., the concentration below which items can be removed from radiological control areas.