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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.
C. L. Brown, L. E. Hansen, H. Toffer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 35 | Number 3 | March 1969 | Pages 358-363
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A20014
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Exponential and critical approach experiments have been performed to determine material buddings and extrapolation distances for several hexagonal lattice arrays of 2.1 wt% 235U enriched uranium tubes in light water. Tubes of two sizes were measured—2.33-in. o.d., 1.77-in. i.d.; and 1.38-in. o.d., 0.63-in. i.d. The arrays included clean lattices of uranium tubes; uranium tubes containing lithium aluminate target rods; uranium tubes with adjacent neutron absorbing columns; and two mixed lattices of 0.95 and 2.1 wt% enriched tubes—one with the 0.95 and 2.1 wt% tubes evenly distributed in the lattice, and the other with the 0.95 and 2.1 wt% tubes arranged in alternate rings. These experiments supplement data obtained in 1965 for 1.002, 1.25, and 1.95 wt% enriched uranium tubes. Critical parameters for these lattices, calculated with the HAMMER code, agree reasonably well with the measured results.