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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
Technical Session|Panel|Sponsored by THD
Wednesday, June 10, 2020|12:00–2:10PM EDT|5
Session Chair:
W. David Pointer
Alternate Chair:
Brian G. Woods
Session Organizer:
Track Organizer:
Igor Bolotnov (NCSU)
Staff Producer:
Janice Lindegard (American Nuclear Society)
Advanced high temperature gas cooled reactors typically rely on high pressure gas flows for heat removal during normal operations and a mix of natural convection, radiation and conduction for heat removal under postulated accident conditions. The combination of high heat capacity structures, relatively low power density, high Prandtl number low-density coolant, and multiple heat removal mechanisms offers significant advantages in terms of passive safety. However, this combination also requires the careful development, verification, and validation of experimental facilities, models and analysis tools that must accurately describe a wide range of flow conditions and heat transfer phenomena. This session provides an opportunity to review current efforts in modeling, simulation or experiments and identify current challenges and opportunities associated with the thermal hydraulics of these systems.
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