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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. Puspalata, S. Sumathi, V. Balaji, S. Rangarajan, S. Velmurugan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 4 | April 2019 | Pages 592-604
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1509586
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main objective of this work is to see the feasibility of using an electrochemical ion-exchange process in line with decontamination for removal of radioactive metal ions from simulated decontaminated solution/metal ion–loaded cation-exchange resin. This could extend the service period of resin, and the volume of radioactive resin (organic) waste generation could be minimized. Simulated decontamination solutions/spent resins were used in the middle section of a three-compartment cell separated by cation-permeable Nafion membranes. Metal ions from this central compartment permeated through the membrane and got deposited on the cathode by application of potential. Process parameters like applied voltage, interelectrode distance, pH, decontamination formulations, and type of membrane were optimized for efficient transport of metal ions. The resin life was observed to be extended by 5 h by an electrochemical regeneration process with Nafion membrane N115. The transport process, as monitored by the change in metal ion concentration in the cathodic compartment, was observed to pass through a maximum. Maximum metal ion removal was observed with formic acid/formate formulation indicating that the presence of acidity in the anodic compartment has a synergistic effect on the transport process. The cathodic compartment deposit was characterized by X-ray diffraction, laser Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and energy dispersive X-ray analysis.
