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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.
Toshiharu Takeishi, Kazunari Katayama, Masabumi Nishikawa, Naoyuki Miya, Kei Masaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 565-568
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Materials Interaction and Permeation | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A988
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium thermal release and full combustion with oxygen were performed on isotropic graphite tiles used for plasma facing material of JT-60U. Approximately 50-80 % of tritium was released by dry argon gas purge and 20-50 % of tritium was released by humid argon gas purge up to 800-1200 °C within one day, respectively. Further several percent of tritium was released by full combustion with oxygen. It was experimentally confirmed that all retained tritium is not released by thermal dry gas purge and by use of isotope exchange reaction at high temperature in such a short period. In the full combustion operation, isotropic graphite begins to combust at higher temperature than 650 °C, but effective combustion temperature was higher than 700 °C. Since it is very difficult to heat the graphite tile attached on the wall of vacuum vessel at higher than 700 °C, it is considered to be not easy to recover all the tritium retained in the graphite while in the vacuum vessel.
