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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.
H. H. Ross, R. P. Gardner, J. W. Dunn, III
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1964 | Pages 521-526
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE64-A20995
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new radiotracer technique for determining wear rates of selected automotive engine parts is described and demonstrated for piston rings. The technique uses Fe55 instead of Fe59 as the radiotracer. A liquid scintillation method for counting Fe55 is necessary since it decays by electron capture and emits only the Mn characteristic X-ray of 5.9 keV. A simple method for extracting the wear particles from the engine oil and getting the iron into the liquid scintillation mixture is described. Counting yields of 8 to 9% are obtained by the method. The Fe55 technique of wear measurement does not directly compete with the existing Fe59 technique since slightly lower sensitivity and longer sample preparation is required. However, the much longer half-life (2.6 years as compared to 45 days) and the lower radiation energy (5.9 keV as compared to over 1 MeV) allows the Fe55 technique to be used for long-term wear studies, for double tracer studies, and for studies of large engine parts.
