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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.
W. C. Redman, M. M. Bretscher
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 1 | January 1967 | Pages 34-44
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18040
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental method for the determination of the spectral average of the capture-to-fission ratio ᾱ for materials inserted in a low-flux reactor is described. The procedure involves a comparison of reactor response to oscillated samples of a fissile material, an absorber, and a spontaneous fission neutron source, plus an experimental determination of fission rate for the fissile material and capture rate for the absorber. In addition, it is necessary that the neutron source be calibrated. These experimental results, combined with a knowledge of the number of neutrons per fission for the fissile material, yield a value of the quantity 1 + ᾱ. This method has been tested in Hi-C Core 10, a critical assembly of 3%-enriched-U02 fuel pins, moderated and reflected by light water, in a lattice spacing which yields a H-to-238U atom ratio of 2:91. The oscillator and absolute counting data yield a value of 0.217 for the central capture-to-fission ratio of 235U, with a standard deviation of ± 0.015. This agrees well with values derived from a combination of measured 235U fission cadmium ratios and calculated thermal and epithermal values for a.
