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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.
Harvey J. Amster, Wilson K. Talley
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 20 | Number 1 | September 1964 | Pages 53-59
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE64-A19274
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When describing neutrons interacting with homogeneous media, Monte Carlo can generate a sequence of energies and flight directions without locating the positions of the collisions that produced them. If the spatial distribution of one of these collisions is then described analytically, unbiased direct samples of the neutron density can conveniently be obtained at specified positions and energies and at discretely sampled angles. Previous applications for plane sources in infinite media with real cross sections are here generalized for plane sources in slabs and point sources within infinite half spaces. A modified treatment for heterogeneous media is also formulated. These extensions to other geometries can provide not only additional calculational standards, but also theoretical results that could disagree with experimental facts only because of the assumed nuclear data.
