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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.
George H. Miley
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 24 | Number 4 | April 1966 | Pages 322-331
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A16400
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis of a parallel-plate UO2-fueled Fission Electric Cell is developed that includes a detailed treatment of the fission-fragment initial-energy spectrum, energy-charge loss during slowing, and energy dependence of the total range. The treatment of fragment transport is based, as much as possible, on correlations of experimental data. However, available data are skimpy, and several discrepancies, e.g., between available differential and integral energy-loss data, are noted. The importance of an accurate fragment transport model is demonstrated by the differences in efficiencies obtained from this detailed treatment, as opposed to earlier calculations that used simpler models, e.g., relative differences between models of as much as 15 and 80% are attributed to the treatment of the fragment charge and energy loss, respectively. The calculations are also shown to be fairly sensitive to the total-range-mass correlation, but only weakly dependent on the choice of the initial fragment charge. While efficiencies for the parallel-plate cell with reasonable fuel-layer thickness are found to range from 2 to 10%, efficiencies for cylindrical or spherical geometry may be 5 to 6 times this, and the concept may be competitive for certain specialized applications.