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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.
T. C. Gillett, R. S. Denning, J. L. Ridihalgh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 31 | Number 2 | November 1976 | Pages 244-249
Technical Paper | Shielding | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31686
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Techniques have been developed for the shield design computations of facilities for the handling and processing of plutonium. These techniques involve the application of a modified version of the point kernel code QAD. Because this modified point kernel code maintains the three-dimensional flexibility and computational efficiency of other point kernel codes, it is well suited to the performance of production shielding-design calculations. Correction factors were developed to account for some inadequacies of the point kernel approach. The accuracy of the code has been determined by comparing results obtained for typical shield configurations with ANISN results and has been found to be adequate for most shielding problems encountered in facilities of this type. Limited comparison to available experimental data indicates the techniques give reasonably good accuracy. Sources of radiation considered include neutrons and gammas from fission, neutrons from (α, n) interactions with light elements, and low-energy gammas from alpha decay.
