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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.
Harold Berger, W. N. Beck
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 15 | Number 4 | April 1963 | Pages 411-414
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A26458
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method for nondestructive inspection of highly radioactive, irradiated reactor fuel specimens is described. The method is a neutron radiographic technique which employs image detectors of metal screens of silver, dysprosium and indium. After exposing these screens to the neutron image, an autoradiograph of the metal screen is taken to produce the radiographic image. By using this technique, interference on the radiograph caused by the radioactivity of the test objects is eliminated. The image quality yielded by this method is excellent and easily shows fuel deformation and void areas, and other components within the fuel assembly capsule. The advantages of this method over other inspection methods for such materials are described.
