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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.
Sunday, September 14, 2025|1:00–5:00PM CDT
Classroom 103
Cost: $49
Recent nuclear data libraries, including both ENDF/B-VIII.0 and the new ENDF/B-VIII.1 release, have included a significantly larger number of thermal scattering law (TSL) files than have previous data releases. This leaves many nuclear criticality safety (NCS) practitioners in the difficult position of selecting TSL files to use in their models without sufficient knowledge, training, or expertise to make informed, physics-based decisions about the appropriateness of the TSL files to their specific applications. This workshop will help bridge the gap by providing the necessary information for NCS practitioners to perform their analysis not just for these libraries, but for any TSL materials in future nuclear data library releases.
This workshop will be broken up into two sections. First, a theory section that will go over: what TSLs are/aren’t, how they’re used in transport codes, and how they should be used in criticality safety applications. Second, there will be a series of practical exercises that will demonstrate the points discussed in the theory section. These practical exercises will be made to ensure that they cover several of the more prominent neutron transport codes used in the international NCS community: SCALE, MCNP, and SERPENT.
Users will be expected to arrive with their own computers or laptops with the codes pre-installed on them. As such, the only prerequisite will be having a working version of the codes installed on their machines. Specifically, the inputs will be designed & optimized to work on SCALE6.3.1, MCNP6.3, and SERPENT2.2. These codes are only required for participation in the practical exercises during the workshop. Attendees are not required to participate in these exercises, and are therefore not required to have a license for these codes to attend. There are no citizenship restrictions.
