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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.
R. L. French, L. G. Mooney
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 43 | Number 3 | March 1971 | Pages 273-280
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A19973
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effect of the air-ground interface on the scattered fast-neutron dose near the ground was measured at a distance of 1000 ft from a 14-MeV neutron source. The source was the HENRE accelerator operated at a height of 112 ft on the BREN tower at the Nevada Test Site. A horizontal slab of polyethylene 1 ft thick and 5 ft square, with Hurst-type fast-neutron dosimeters mounted on its upper and lower surfaces, separated the neutrons arriving through the upper 2π solid angle from those from the lower 2π. A third detector, mounted on a boom, measured the free-field. The entire assembly was suspended by a hoist system to make measurements at 0.75 to 70 ft above the ground. The scattered dose at the top detector was essentially constant; that at the bottom detector increased by a factor of approximately 2 between 0.75 and 70 ft, and the free-field dose increased by < 25% over the same height range. The experiment provided confirmation, both qualitative and quantitative, of the “first-last collision model” of the air-ground interface effect.