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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.
P. V. Subhash, Gunjan Indauliya, T. Sai Chaitanya, Priti Kanth, S. Jakhar, Sanjeev Varshney, Siddharth Kumar, Raja Krishna, Nirav Bhaliya, Sapna Mishra, P. Shrishail, Vinay Kumar
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | February 2017 | Pages 215-224
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST16-241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Activation and radioactive waste analysis has been carried out for an X-ray crystal survey spectrometer (XRCS) sight tube, which will be installed in equatorial port No. 11 assigned for the ITER diagnostics. The neutron transport calculations are performed using the Monte Carlo N-Particle code (MCNP). The base C-Lite neutronics ITER model is grossly modified to include all required details of the port plug, diagnostic apertures, and diagnostic system. The transport results provide neutron flux at desired positions. The sight tube is supposed to be placed in the interspace, after the closure plate, to channel X-rays to the spectrometer. Complete radioactive inventory calculations along with contact doses and nuclear activity levels are obtained for two different kinds of sight tube material. FISPACT-2007, an inventory code, is used for this purpose. The analysis for this particular sight tube can be used to obtain a material preference based on a radiation point of view. Further, the dependence of neutron spectrum and irradiation time on activity levels, contact dose rate, and production of dominant dose contributing radionuclides has been studied. Dominant radionuclides that contribute up to 95% of the total dose are identified, and their pathways are generated to back trace their sources as an effort to reduce the dose rate. The effect of reducing the cobalt content in SS316L(N)-IG on the contact dose rate is evaluated separately for the sight tube of the XRCS system. Many of the FISPACT calculations are repeated with ACTYS, a locally developed activation solver.
