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August 2025
Latest News
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.
Takehiko Yokomine
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 840-844
Computational Tools, Modeling & Validation | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12491
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal properties of the pebble beds have a significant impact on the temperature profile of the Helium Cooled Pebble Bed blanket and the extraction of heat from the pebble beds to the coolant. The effective thermal conductivity of pebble bed has been modeled as the isotropic one. However, the isotropic thermal conductivity inherently can be achieved only the case with perfectly isotropic arrangement which is difficult to realized in the actual blanket device. In this paper, the relation between effective thermal conductivity tensor and fabric tensor in 2D pebble bed is investigated experimentally. It is cleared that the effective thermal conductivity tensor is proportional to the structural anisotropic tensor. And, the anisotropic feature is quite different between core region and near wall region, so that it is suggested that modeling of the effective thermal conductivity tensor of the pebble bed should be separately carried out at least in above two regions.