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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.
W. W. Graham, III, D. S. Harmer, C. E. Cohn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 38 | Number 1 | October 1969 | Pages 33-41
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The familiar rod-drop method for determining delayed-neutron parameters has been refined with new techniques of data collection, analysis, and correction. Values for a highly enriched uranium, heavy-water reactor have been obtained which have a general applicability because they have been accurately corrected for reactor power history, post-shutdown sub-critical neutron multiplication, and finite rod-drop time. Neutron flux after shutdown by rod drop in the Georgia Tech Research Reactor was monitored for periods in excess of three days using two detectors operated in parallel. One detector used a thermal-neutron-sensitive scintillator, the other a fission chamber. Flux-decay data were fit by weighted least squares using the Variable Metric Minimization method. This method was able to fit all the data simultaneously without limit on the number of fitting parameters. The most statistically-significant fit was obtained with 13 delayed-neutron groups, one of which was attributed to background due to its negligibly small decay constant. A fitting expression was used which accurately described the data collection process in which each data point was taken as the time integral of the flux over a finite time interval. The results are compared with values which have been obtained by small irradiated uranium samples and with decay-constant values in the last reported heavy-water in-reactor determination. There are indications that delayed-neutron effectiveness is enhanced by ∼3% in this type of reactor and that the effectiveness of photoneutron groups is decreased by ∼28% because of attenuation of high-energy gamma rays.