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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.
Min-Nan Huang, M. M. El-Wakil
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 28 | Number 1 | April 1967 | Pages 12-19
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18662
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A visual and frictional pressure-drop study of low-pressure high-void-fraction two-phase flow has been performed in a boiling-water natural-circulation system with heat addition. Heat was added uniformly by four tubular electrical resistance elements placed parallel to the flow, simulating cylindrical nuclear fuel elements. A 6-ft vertical test channel, 1.25-in. i.d. was used. It contained six opposite pairs of observing windows permitting high-speed motion pictures of the flow to be taken at different operating conditions. Experimental two-phase pressure-drop data at various flow rates were conducted at pressures of 25, 35, and 50 psia, and steam qualities ranging from 0.7 to 7.8% corresponding to void fractions of 63 to 94.5%. Bubbly and transition from bubbly to slug flow regimes were observed. Strong pulsations, inherent in natural-circulation systems with internal heat addition, were also observed. Frictional pressure-drop data were obtained as a function of both quality and mass flow rate. Under the conditions of the investigation, no discontinuities in flow regime or frictional pressure drop were observed and the Martinelli-Nelson correlation for the friction multiplier was found to greatly underestimate the value of the multiplier. A motion-picture film of flow is available as a supplement to this paper.