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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.
R. Pampin, M. J. Loughlin, M. J. Walsh
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 751-755
Nuclear Analysis | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST56-751
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Systematic analysis of the radiation fields throughout the ITER core LIDAR diagnostic system were performed to support the design optimisation and assessment process, aiming at achieving the required performance in terms of reliability, occupational safety and interface with neighboring systems. Neutron, photon, nuclear heat and material activation responses were estimated for a variety of configurations, and improved using a combination of analytical "rules of thumb" and numerical computations with the ATTILATM and FISPACT codes. The neutron flux at the backplate of the port plug was significantly reduced (to ∼2x107 n/cm2-s) by fine-tuning the reference geometry of the laser labyrinth, and guidelines were provided for quick estimation of the effect of future design changes. The current design has adequate lifetime of essential optical components, in particular absorption in collection windows below ∼1%, and reduced dose to workers during maintenance according to the ALARA principle.
