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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.
G. Bitelli, R. Martinelli, F. V. Orestano, E. Santandrea
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 28 | Number 2 | May 1967 | Pages 270-276
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A17477
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of critical experiments, performed with organic-moderated platetype assemblies containing uranium enriched to 90% in 235U, in the zero-power reactor ROSPO, are reported. Several cores, differing in critical radius (19.5 to 47.5 cm) and in the ratio of uranium-to-stainless-steel plate number, have been investigated. The comparison with the reactivities calculated by a standard two-group calculation procedure shows an overestimate of the eff's (up to 1.95% for the smallest critical core) with a systematic dependence on the core radius. A satisfactory agreement is found for large-size cores (R ≥ 40 cm). It is shown that simple calculational improvements, such as a four-group evaluation of the nuclear constants, and a more detailed treatment of core-radial reflector interface zone, lead to a homogeneously good agreement (within 0.25% ) over the whole range of core dimensions.