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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. J. Walsh and George Burnet
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 25 | Number 3 | July 1966 | Pages 227-235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17829
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To learn more about liquid metal distillation as it might be applied to nuclear fuel recovery and reprocessing, liquid metal distillations involving the tin-zinc, cadmium-bismuth, and indium-zinc binary systems were conducted in an evacuated chamber. An x-ray fluorescence spectrometer provided a continuous chemical analysis of the distilling surface during each run. This information was used to evaluate the validity of various theories and assumptions concerning surface depletion, oxide contamination, and turbulence effects. The existence of a large surface depletion effect in nonturbulent metal distillations was proven. However, the level of turbulence necessary to eliminate concentration gradients was found to be much lower than that assumed by some designers of commercial equipment. The presence of surface oxides was often an important factor in determining the enrichment and rate of distillation. The Langmuir-Knudsen theory was shown to be unreliable when liquid diffusion or surface oxide resistances were significant. A more complete approach involving the principles of transport phenomena was developed. An analytical solution was derived for the nonturbulent case and was tested using the spectrometer data.
