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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.
Robert J. Schott, Charles L. Weaver, Mark A. Prelas, Kyuhak Oh, Jason B. Rothenberger, R. V. Tompson, Denis A. Wisniewski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 2 | February 2013 | Pages 349-353
Technical Paper | Radioisotopes | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15789
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The use of a photon intermediate direct energy conversion (PIDEC) process to develop a proof of concept of a long-lived and efficient nuclear battery powered by a radioactive beta source is discussed. Fundamentally, PIDEC is a means of matching the scale length of the range of radiation to the scale length of the transducer. The device uses a photovoltaic cell and excimer gas-based photon source. In this work, argon was used to produce the excimer photon source (argon excimer at 129 nm) with a pressure range from 7 × 10-3 to 1.4 × 107 Pa (10-6 to 2100 psig). The beta source used in this study was a 90Sr source that has a daughter, 90Y, that then decays to stable 90Zr. Intermediate shielding from lead and an argon gas plenum were used to prevent damage to the photovoltaic cell. This battery demonstrated power variations with gas pressure as expected, and no radiation damage to the photovoltaic cell was observed over a period in excess of 150 h. Such a long exposure period demonstrates the desired tolerance of the device to the direct radiation damage that would otherwise be sustained in normal semiconductor-based energy conversion systems.
