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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.
S. Kaplan and J. B. Yasinsky
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 25 | Number 4 | August 1966 | Pages 430-438
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18565
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The physical question of the spatial stability of a reactor with respect to xenon oscillations corresponds to a mathematical question regarding the location in the complex plane of the roots of a certain eigenvalue problem. The introduction of feedback controllers corresponds to the imposition of constraints on the eigenvalue problem. The effect of certain such constraints on the locations of the eigenvalues is examined in this paper for the idealized case of a one-group uniform-ring reactor. It is found that the eigenvalues obey a rule related to Rayleigh's separation theorem for vibrating mechanical systems. A numerical example is given in which the solutions of the constrained eigenproblem are displayed, interpreted physically, and compared with those of the unconstrained problem.
