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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.
J.M. Perlado
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1303-1308
Fusion Application | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24910
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The more important neutronic characteristics are simultaneously analyzed in the context of fusion-fission blankets. The analysis is referenced to a gas protected cavity, where dimensions and material compositions are varied. It is intended to know the regimes in which that hybrid blanket works when two independent variables are changed. The 6Li enrichment and the atomic density of 238U have been selected as those variables, and the study is performed for two different solid breeders Li2O and γ-LiAlO2. The effect of the thickness of the fertile zone was pointed out in previous articles and here we look for an optimum working point and will set a comparison with precedent results when LiH is used as the solid breeder. A physical figure of merit is established, which relates the characteristics of the fertile zone. Constraints on the TBR and fissile production are introduced to obtain efficient working points. Finally, the He, liquid lithium and Li17Pb83 eutectic are considered as candidate coolants and their effects on the neutronic performances are analyzed.
