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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Mahmoud Z. Youssef, Russell Feder
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 571-581
Nuclear Systems: Analysis and Experiments | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 2) Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST64-571
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The upper, equatorial, and lower diagnostics port plugs in ITER will include numerous intermingling labyrinths and many streaming paths whose impact should be carefully studied. For this purpose, the 3-D Discrete Ordinates code, Attila, has been routinely used by PPPL/UCLA to assess the nuclear field in these geometrically complex plugs both during operation and after shutdown. In this paper we describe the calculation procedure followed and the input parameters/assumptions applied to assess the shutdown dose rates (SDDR) everywhere with emphasize on their values inside the generic equatorial port plug (GEPP) and its inter-space extension area. Factors inherent in the Discrete Ordinates method that impact the accuracy of the results (e.g. quadrature sets used, boundary conditions applied, etc.) are discussed. Means to minimize streaming through straight gaps and open channels present in the GEPP are presented in this paper, along with an examination of their effectiveness in reducing the SDDR in the port inter-space area.
