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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.
Joel Adir and John R. Lamarsh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1969 | Pages 14-26
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A21111
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new analytical method is presented for computing the thermal utilization of a noncylindrical unit cell containing a cylindrical fuel rod. No cylindrization of the cell is required. The boundary condition at the outer edge of the cell is formulated in terms of a procedure that minimizes the square of the neutron current at a number of unspecified points along the edge. This leads to rapid convergence in computations of the thermal utilization, even with tightly packed lattices for which previous methods may not converge. The method is used to derive specific formulas for the thermal utilization using diffusion theory; the method of Amouyal, Benoist, and Horowitz; and, finally, the PN method with anisotropic scattering. Sample computations using these models are also presented.
