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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.
P. A. Davis, S. B. Kim, S. L. Chouhan, W. J. G. Workman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 504-507
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Containment, Safety, and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A976
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium concentrations were measured in a large number of environmental and biological samples collected during 2002 at two dairy farms and a hobby farm near Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario, Canada. The data cover most compartments of the terrestrial food chain in an agricultural setting and include detailed information on the diets of the local farm animals. Ratios of plant OBT concentration to air moisture HTO varied between 0.12 and 0.56, and were generally higher for the forage crops collected at the dairy farms than for the garden vegetables sampled at the hobby farm. Animal OBT to air HTO ratios were more uniform, ranging from 0.18 to 0.45, and were generally higher for the milk and beef samples from the dairy farms than for the chicken products from the hobby farm. The observed OBT concentrations in plants and animals were compared with predictions of IMPACT, the model used by the Canadian nuclear industry to calculate annual average doses due to routine releases. The model performed well on average for the animal endpoints but overestimated concentrations in plants by a factor of 2.
