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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.
F. L. Carlsen, Jr., E. S. Bomar, W. O. Harms
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 20 | Number 2 | October 1964 | Pages 180-200
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE64-A28932
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Progress is reported in several areas of development of fueled graphite containing coated particles for nonpurged gas-cooled reactor systems. The sol-gel process has been modified for making spherical particles of both thorium/uranium carbide and thorium/uranium oxide suitable for coating. Equipment has been assembled and methods have been developed for deposition of pyrolytic-carbon coatings under well-controlled conditions. Damage to coated particles during fabrication into a graphite matrix depends on the molding pressure and the volumetric content of coated particles. Vendor-supplied coated particles and fueled graphite spheres have been evaluated extensively in both in- and out-of-reactor tests. Duplex- and triplex-coated particles have excellent fission-gas retention at 2050 F to burnups of 15 at.%. Fueled graphite spheres containing coated particles have good irradiation performance, but the fission-gas-release rates are somewhat higher than for unsupported coated particles. Fueled graphite spheres react with water vapor about as rapidly as do Speer Mod-2 and ATJ grades of graphite. The diffusion rates in pyrolytic carbon are the same for uranium, thorium and protactinium. The diffusion rates in the direction parallel to the deposition plane are much higher than those in the perpendicular direction.