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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.
W. G. Clarke, D. R. Harris, M. Natelson, J. F. Walter
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 3 | March 1968 | Pages 440-457
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A17587
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fluctuating populations of particles in a reactor are described in usual kinetics studies by the “numbers” of neutrons and precursors which, in the absence of feedback mechanisms, can be identified with first moments of the population distributions. At a higher level of description, variances and covariances of the neutron and precursor populations are determined from equations similar to the first-moment equations. The behavior of these first and second moments for time-varying reactors is explored here analytically and numerically, and inferences are made as to the effect of initial reactor conditions and modes of reactivity change on this dynamic behavior.
