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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. W. Weidner, G. L. Kulcinski, J. F. Santarius, R. P. Ashley, G. Piefer, B. Cipiti, R. Radel, S. Krupakar Murali
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 539-543
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-8
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes a proof of principle experiment to produce 13N using an inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device. This radioisotope is often used in positron emission tomography scans to image the heart. The 10-minute half-life of 13N limits its use to those areas and clinics that possess an accelerator. A portable IEC device could be brought to remote locations, however, and produce short-lived PET isotopes on-site. Using the 14.7 MeV protons produced from the D-3He fuel cycle, the University of Wisconsin IEC device was used to produce approximately 4 - 8 Bq of 13N during two separate experiments.
