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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.
Donald Strominger and Gordon Schlesinger
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 21 | Number 4 | April 1965 | Pages 441-450
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A18788
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Solid-state p-n junction counters have been fabricated to measure fission rates of materials with different fission thresholds. The fission reactions are caused by neutrons varying in energy from thermal energies for U235 to 1.5 MeV for Th232. The data gathered from these solid-state fission counters have been used to compare experimental with calculated fission rates in the AETR cores. The fission counter is assembled by placing an electroplated foil of a fissionable material near a p-n junction detector. An aluminum cap is placed over each detector and foil to form a neat, compact assembly. The resulting counter is small enough to fit inside a reactor with minimum distortion to the neutron spectrum. Fission counters employing Th232, U233, U234, U235, U236, U238, Np237, and Pu239 as the principal fissionable material have been successfully fabricated. These solid-state fission counters have proved reliable instruments to measure neutron fluxes in high gamma-ray fields. True fission events are easily separated from other induced reactions in the counter.
