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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
X.-N. Chen, D. Zhang, W. Maschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 275-280
Modeling and Simulations | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13432
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper is a theoretical study of a radial standing wave, which can be applied in the so-called traveling wave reactor (TWR). Two-dimensional cylindrical core geometry is considered and the fuel is assumed to drift radially, which corresponds to a radial fuel shuffling scheme in practice. A one-group diffusion equation coupled with burn-up equations is set up, where the burn-up solution is obtained numerically. The uranium-plutonium (U-Pu) conversion cycle with pure 238U as fresh fuel is considered under conditions of a typical sodium cooled fast reactor with metallic uranium fuel loaded. The asymptotic problem is solved by a time-stepping iteration scheme and the radial standing wave solution is obtained together with certain eigenvalue keff.The neutron flux, the neutron fluence and the net neutron generation cross section are presented and discussed for the inward fuel drifting motion.
