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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.
Martin Victor Polley
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | December 1985 | Pages 557-567
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33678
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is widely experienced that operation with a low primary coolant pHT leads to heavy deposition on fuel-pin cladding in pressurized water reactors (PWRs). This is thought to be due principally to solubilities of corrosion products exhibiting negative temperature dependencies at low coolant pHT, leading to precipitation from the solution onto core surfaces. Solubilities also increase at low pHT values and this may be an additional reason for the increased deposition. Particulate deposition may also depend on coolant pHT. Operation at low coolant pHT may thus cause increased corrosion product activity transport, leading to higher dose rates around the primary circuit. The possible correlation between low pHT operation and steam generator channel head dose rates was investigated, using detailed data from nine Westinghouse PWRs. The coolant chemistry was quantified by calculating both the percentage of operating time at low pHT and a numerical “precipitation index” in order to establish the extent of operation below that coolant pHT above which little core crud deposition is expected. Time averaged pH’s were also calculated for each cycle. End-of-cycle dose rates were plotted against these coolant chemistry parameters on a plantby-plant basis and statistical tests were applied following linear regression analysis. Positive correlations were obtained and it was found that, for the limited number of plants in the survey, these correlations were between the categories “significant” and “probably significant” for cycle 1 and cycle 2 data.
