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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.
S. K. Trikha, P. S. Grover
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 4 | December 1966 | Pages 447-452
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18415
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the case of crystalline (coherent) moderators, it has been observed that the trapping of neutrons in the Bragg peaks greatly affects the decay of a neutron pulse from inside small assemblies and leads to a much larger value of the observed decay constant as compared to the theoretical limit. In the present paper we report a theoretical study of the pulsed neutron problem in finite assemblies of incoherent solid moderators. We find that even in the absence of the trapped neutrons, it will take a very long time for the decay constant to approach the theoretical asymptotic limit (υ∑s)min. A study of transient spectra has also been made in these assemblies. We find that for large assemblies (B2 < ), the value of λ calculated from the study of transient spectra agrees well with the asymptotic decay constant. However, for small assemblies, the equilibrium is not attained within 600 μsec, the time limit of our studies.