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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|Fission Surface Power/Nuclear Electric Propulsion
Thursday, May 9, 2024|10:00–11:40AM MDT|Sweeney F
Session Chair:
Timothy Reuter
Session Organizer:
Most space nuclear systems are being designed with defense and human exploration applications in mind, but science applications could be the first meaningful use cases for these systems as they require significantly less power. What design features are scientists looking for and what would be the most impactful missions to apply nuclear power and propulsion to? The Accelerating Space Science with Nuclear Technology workshop took place in Tempe on December 6-7, 2023 to address these questions. The purposes of this workshop were to: 1) obtain direct feedback from the space science community about how they could use these technologies to acquire critical new scientific understanding of the solar system as well as to identify the space nuclear system attributes which would be most advantageous for space science missions and 2) inform the space science community of the progress being made toward operational nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion and fission surface power systems. This panel discussion will summarize the results of the workshop for the NETS community to increase awareness of space science mission needs and priorities for space nuclear technology.
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