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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.
Takashi Nakamura, Tomonori Hyodo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 2 | May 1969 | Pages 246-250
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19722
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A semiempirical formula for the gamma-ray albedo of alternating layers is proposed. The values of the albedo calculated by this formula agree with the experimental ones for alternating layers of tin-aluminum and lead-aluminum slabs within ∼10%, except for the case of very thin alternating layers. This formula was applied to the angular distribution of photons backscattered by the alternating layers and the difference between experimental and calculated values was < 18%.