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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. A. Karam
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 37 | Number 2 | August 1969 | Pages 192-197
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A20678
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental method for the determination of the normalization integral (denominator of perturbation expression) has been developed and used in three fast assemblies. The procedure consists of measuring the apparent reactivity associated with a calibrated 252Cf neutron source at a known power level. The method is independent of the geometrical configuration of the nuclear reactor. Additionally the spatial distributions of the importance of fission neutrons were measured by observing the rate of the linear increase of the neutron population due to the 252Cf source as a function of position in each fast assembly. The measured values of the normalization integrals (N.I.) as well as the measured distribution of were higher than those obtained with multigroup calculations.
