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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.
L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, D. Paige, the ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 440-444
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A726
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As the safety assessment frequently requires knowledge of the activation parameters, we estimated the highest possible activity, decay heat, and waste disposal rating on the time scale after shutdown for the compact stellarator power plant ARIES-CS. We selected two widely different systems employing SiC/SiC composites and low-activation ferritic steel (FS) as structural materials. Our results show that components of both systems qualify as Class C low-level waste (LLW) at the end of a 100 y storage period following the decommissioning of the plant. The SiC blanket, vacuum vessel, and magnet offer very low waste disposal rating to the extent that a Class A LLW seems achievable for these components. On this last point, we discussed the split between the Class A and Class C wastes, emphasizing our motivation to lower the level of ARIES-CS radioactive waste.
