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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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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.
Wednesday, July 23, 2025|1:00–5:00PM EDT
Beach Room
Price: $49
Organizers: Nick Herring (ORNL), Mehdi Asgari (ORNL), Matthew Jessee (ORNL), and Andrew Godfrey (Veracity Nuclear, LLC)
VERA—Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications—is a state-of-the-art Light Water Reactor (LWR) core simulator using novel computational methods that integrates reactor physics, thermal hydraulics, and fuel performance into a single simulation platform. The goal of this workshop is to provide a series of lectures and calculation demonstrations for trainees to learn the basic principles of VERA modeling for Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs). The workshop will provide basic modeling demonstrations and exercises for pin, assembly, and full-core simulations. New features developed for Boiling Water Reactor calculations will also be demonstrated.
VERA developers and analysts from ORNL and VeraCity Nuclear, LLC will provide this training. Participants do not need to have a VERA license to attend. The trainers will be performing calculations during the training using computational resources at the Nuclear Computational Resource Center (NCRC) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). License, code access, and use of INL NCRC will be discussed throughout the training.
