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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.
G. E. Hansen and H. A. Sandmeier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 22 | Number 3 | July 1965 | Pages 315-320
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A20935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Adjoint transport theory is most widely used in perturbation theory. A most common problem here is the determination of the reactivity change in a self-multiplying system due to the insertion of an absorber in a small region. There is, however, a class of problems of the source-detector type where adjoint transport theory proves to be a very effective and fast way of obtaining the desired results. In many practical source problems we want to evaluate the reaction rate, say fissions or absorptions, in a material surrounded by a moderator due to a neutron flux incident on the assembly. Here the main advantage of using the adjoint method as opposed to the conventional real-flux shell-source calculations is a significant reduction in computer time. The reactions induced by each group of source neutrons is obtained from one run of an adjoint problem. To obtain the same information from real-flux calculations we need an individual run for every energy group g. Computer time savings ranging by a factor of 5 to 30 are representative. The theory previously reported by one of us (H.A.S.) in the classified literature is derived and subsequently applied to the following problems. a. the fissions induced in a spherical plutonium-detector foil separated by a moderating layer from an incident collimated neutron beam; b. a neutron-dose-rate detector device consisting of a lithium iodide crystal to register absorptions surrounded by a sphere of polyethylene; c. the theoretical evaluation of the neutronic coupling coefficient between two reactors, as one might visualize in a clustered-Rover nuclear-reactor rocket-engine system.