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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.
M. J. Lancefield
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 37 | Number 3 | September 1969 | Pages 423-442
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19117
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The efficacy of the overlapping group method in fast-reactor analysis is investigated and tested on an idealized fast-reactor configuration. A full transport-theory treatment is adopted and the overlapping group equations are derived by the indirect use of a variational principle. A number of refinements to the basic method have been examined and serve to demonstrate that with a judicious choice of variational functional and trial functions it is possible to obtain accurate estimates not only of the reactivity and other integral quantities but also of the detailed flux. These include: leaving both the space/angle and energy dependence of the trial functions to be determined by the variational principle, incorporating discontinuous trial functions, and the use of a new variational principle for criticality problems that leads to estimates of homogeneous functionals of the unknown flux.
