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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. Yee, W. Davis, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 24 | Number 1 | January 1966 | Pages 1-5
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18118
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Prolonged exposure of the hydrogen form of a cation-exchange resin—a sulfonated copolymer of polystyrene crosslinked with divinylbenzene—to gamma radiation and flowing water caused more drastic changes in the chemical and physical properties of the material than has been reported by other investigators for resin exposed to like dosage in a static system. After a dose of 0.75 × 109 rads in a dynamic system, the rate of loss of strong-acid capacity was 20 to 25%/(W-h g) of dry resin, compared with the 4% and the 10 to 20% found by others for the static system. Also, de-crosslinking of more than 4% of the resin matrix accompanied this loss of capacity, compared with the more moderate de-crosslinking or even additional crosslinking reported for the static system. Gamma radiation also caused gas evolution, bead swelling, and produced a weak-acid capacity in the resin equivalent to 3 to 5% of the original strong-acid capacity. Decomposition products included soluble sulfuric, sulfonic, and oxalic acids and insoluble bits of resin. The average rate of loss of sulfur during exposure was estimated to represent 1.0 to 1.2 atoms lost per 100 eV of energy absorbed.