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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.
D. V. Gopinath, K. Santhanam
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 43 | Number 2 | February 1971 | Pages 197-211
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A21267
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Here we present the results of extensive calculations on the gamma-ray transport in finite heterogeneous systems using the technique developed in Part I of this paper. Systems studied are water, concrete, aluminum, iron, and lead, and the data presented are: evolution of spectra with collisions, reflected and transmitted spectra, spectra at different depths, and buildup factors for different source energies and different thicknesses of each medium. Similar data are also presented for two-region systems of water-iron, iron-lead, and water-lead. Several interesting results have been observed, among which are: (a) a step structure and a second peak in the low energy part of the back-scattered spectra from light media, (b) progressive buildup of a peak in the low energy region of transmitted flux, and (c) significant dip in the build-up factors near the outer boundary of the systems. The results are discussed on the basis of the physical processes involved. A comparison of the present results with those published in literature is made.
