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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.
L. Rolf Peterson, Lynn E. Weaver
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 21 | Number 1 | January 1965 | Pages 40-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A21014
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the work previously reported, the solution to the problem of minimizing boiling reactor noise through external control was based on the work of the late Norbert Wiener. There are, however, serious drawbacks in applying Wiener theory. The mathematical sophistication and algebraic complexity greatly increase as more realistic and complex models are assumed for the reactor. Physical intuition is lost among the numerous digital calculations required for complex systems. In this paper a new graphical technique is used to determine an optimum reactor control system that will minimize boiling reactor noise. This technique practically eliminates these serious drawbacks and permits a considerable physical insight into the basic structural properties of optimum control systems to minimize reactor noise. Contrary to previous results, it was found that a reactor control system independent of reactor power level except for a gain constant could be designed that would minimize boiling noise at all power levels. This, in effect, eliminates the need for a complex adaptive control system to account for the dependency of the optimum reactor control system on reactor power level. Simulation studies verified these findings.