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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 Kiguchi, Shigehiro An, Akira Oyama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 43 | Number 3 | March 1971 | Pages 328-340
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A19979
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The energy modal synthesis method is applied to the computation of the neutron-multiplication factor, the sodium-void coefficient, and the spatial-power distribution of an idealized fast reactor configuration. The method is formulated by means of the variational principle and the error estimator is introduced by the expansion technique of the trial functions in the eigenfunction series. In the space-independent case, the sodium-void coefficient and its error are obtained very accurately by the linear combination of two modes, and the optimal two modes are chosen by the physical consideration. In the one-dimensional case, the continuous-type and the discontinuous-type energy modal synthesis method are formulated. In both cases the infinite-medium spectra and some supplementary modes are used as the trial energy modes. The results of a few-mode synthesis give a good estimate of the reactor parameters, and the error can be evaluated successfully by the error estimator.
