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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
Walter N. Podney, Harold P. Smith, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 29 | Number 3 | September 1967 | Pages 373-380
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A17284
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simple kinetics model is proposed that describes time dependence of the prompt-neutron population in a cavity reactor in terms of a linear, first-order differential equation for the net thermal-neutron current at the cavity wall. The model is applicable if the cavity albedo changes slowly during a neutron lifetime and does not exceed a specified maximum value. This range of applicability is defined by deriving the kinetics equation on the basis of an age-diffusion theory approximation that describes the time dependence of the thermal-neutron flux at the cavity wall in terms of a Volterra integral equation of the second kind. The method of deriving the kinetics equation suggests a means of experimentally determining the effective multiplication factor and average neutron lifetime-to-fission for more complex cavity geometries by measuring thermal-neutron absorption rate in a nonmultiplying gas in the cavity.
