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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.
M. Goldsmith
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 15 | Number 4 | April 1963 | Pages 382-387
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A26454
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A few-group method of calculating the epithermal flux in the vicinity of a slab absorber is developed. Non-moderating absorbers are treated in the P-1, P-3, and DP-1 approximations by applying blackness boundary conditions at the slab surfaces. A code which generates these coefficients is described. Comparison with Monte Carlo calculations indicates that six epithermal groups are needed to calculate the absorption rate to within 2% in a highly absorbing (optical depth = 10.6 at 0.025 ev) boron plate. An iterative method of treating moderating absorbers is also developed. Approximately three quarters of the error caused by neglect of moderation is removed after a single iteration.
