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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.
Shawky F. Nassar and Glenn Murphy
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1969 | Pages 70-79
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A21114
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The diffusion parameters of light water have been measured by the pulsed-source method. The neutron bursts were produced from a Texas Neutron Generator by pulsing the ion source and using the 3H (d, n) 4He reaction. Neutrons were injected into spherical volumes of H2O and the decay constants of the neutrons were determined by means of an enriched BF3 miniature proportional counter. Neutron lifetime measurements were performed on small and large water samples with values of the geometric buckling from 0.035 to 0.655 cm−2. A harmonic analysis was conducted for the large geometries, while the waiting time method was used for the smaller ones. In the harmonic analysis, it appeared that a detector in a sphere is more sensitive to neutron fluctuation with time than it would be in a rectangular or cylindrical system. The diffusion parameters, D0 and C, were determined by fitting the decay constants to the equations and , where and are the geometric and the corresponding transport buckling, respectively. The second fit gave a lower standard deviation of C than did the first fit.
