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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Lina Quintieri et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 314-321
Modeling and Simulations | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13439
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A photoneutron source has been designed and realized at the Beam Test Facility (BTF) of the electron/positron collider Dane, in the National Laboratory of Frascati, near Rome (Italy). Neutrons are produced sending high energy electrons to impinge on an optimized Tungsten target. This source could be suitably used for calibration of neutron detectors as well as for material and nuclear science investigations. Moreover photoneutron processes are encountered in many physics domains: from accelerator to reactor physics, mainly related to neutron shielding issues in high Z materials, used for gamma shielding.This work presents the Monte Carlo simulations performed with different codes (FLUKA and MCNPX) to estimate the neutron rate and energy spectrum, obtained when 510 MeV electrons are sent against the designed target. Finally, the comparison of the Monte Carlo predictions of neutron and photon fluences around the target with the experimental values is discussed.
