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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.
Sunday, July 20, 2025|8:00AM–12:00PM EDT
Beach Room
Price: $49
Organizer: Joffrey Dorville (ANL)
OpenMC is a general purpose Monte Carlo neutron and photon transport simulation code. It is capable of simulating 3D models based on constructive solid geometry with second-order surfaces as well as CAD-based geometries. It also has built-in capabilities for activation/depletion to track material evolution with time. This workshop will present a brief overview of the code and its growing list of features, and a walk-through on how to setup input files using the Python API using nuclear reactor examples. The workshop will also demonstrate how to leverage powerful Python packages for post-processing of results. Participants should bring their laptop to follow along and run OpenMC. A link will be provided to access the software on a cloud computing platform.
Attendees will indeed be running jobs interactively at the workshop. We find this to be a much more enjoyable experience than watching hours of powerpoint presentations!
OpenMC is open source so there are no licensing requirements. As the description above alludes to, participants will need to have a laptop with an internet connection and a web browser, but they don't need to have anything else preinstalled.
