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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.
R. G. Alsmiller, Jr., T. A. Gabriel, M. P. Guthrie
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 40 | Number 3 | June 1970 | Pages 365-374
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE70-A20187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Electron-photon cascade calculations and photoneutron-production calculations have been carried out for 150-MeV electrons on thick targets of Be and Ta. In the energy region of the giant resonance an evaporation model was used to calculate the production spectrum, and at higher energies (25 MeV) an intranuclear-cascade model was used. The calculated photoneutron-production spectra cover the energy range 0.01 to ∼100 MeV and are given for target thicknesses of 1 and 20 radiation lengths in both Ta and Be. A method is described and sufficient information is given so that estimates of the photoneutron-production spectra in targets of intermediate thicknesses may be obtained. Results on the photoproton-production spectra are also given. The spectra from the Ta and Be targets are compared and are found to have very different characteristics in that the number of low-energy (< 1 MeV) neutrons produced in the Ta target is much greater than that produced in the Be target and the number of high-energy ( a few MeV) neutrons produced in the Be target is larger than that produced in the Ta target.
