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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.
J. J. Rush, D. W. Connor, and R. S. Carter
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 25 | Number 4 | August 1966 | Pages 383-389
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18558
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The leakage flux from an 18 × 18 in. cylinder of D2O with a beam of pile neutrons incident at its center has been studied at D2O temperatures from 22° to 293°K. Intensities through beryllium and graphite filters, as well as indium foil transmissions, have been measured to determine cold-neutron fractions and neutron temperatures for the emerging spectra. The results of these measurements show that large volumes of D2O ice can be useful as low-temperature moderators in reactors. The percentage of leakage neutrons with λn ≥ 3.95 Å is 21% at 22°K, a 20-fold increase over the fraction at 293°K, and about twice the value at 100°K. The neutron temperature of the leakage spectrum, calculated from the transmission data assuming a Maxwellian distribution, decreases with moderator temperature, reaching a value of about 75° for D2O at 22°K. An abrupt increase in the fraction of cold neutrons is observed at the D2O freezing point, which appears to reflect a change in the transport rather than the moderating properties of the D2O, due to a decrease in the cross section for long-wavelength neutrons.
