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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.
James F. Jackson, William E. Kastenberg
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 42 | Number 3 | December 1970 | Pages 278-294
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE70-A21218
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A numerical investigation of space-time effects in the dynamic behavior of fast breeder reactors is presented. The basic approach is to compare results from point kinetics and time-dependent diffusion theory. The accuracy of point kinetics is determined for different approximations to the shape function used in calculating the initiating reactivity and feedback coefficients. Several space-dependent feedback models are studied. The importance of considering spatial effects that arise from two sources is shown. The first type consists of those induced by local reactivity perturbations. Usually, these can be adequately accounted for through the proper selection of a shape function. For example, it is found that when calculating rapid, localized ramp insertions, a good choice is the flux shape at prompt critical. The second type consists of those induced by feedback with strong space dependence. Spatial effects of this type are shown to be difficult to cope with when applying point kinetics.
