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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.
Mario Dalle Donne, Walter Hame
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 111-124
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33713
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Many critical heat flux (CHF) correlations have been developed for water-cooled rod clusters representing typical pressurized water reactor (PWR) or boiling water reactor fuel element geometries with relatively wide rod lattices. The fuel elements of an advanced pressurized water reactor (APWR), however, have a tight fuel rod lattice in order to increase fuel utilization. It was therefore decided to produce a new CHF correlation valid for rod bundles with tight lattices. The already available WSC-2 correlation was chosen as a basis. The geometry-dependent parameters of this correlation were again determined by root-mean-square fitting from the experimental data of CHF test performed within the framework of the light water breeder reactor program at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. These tests include triangular arrays of rod bundles with very tight lattices. The effects of spiral spacer ribs were based on experimental data from Columbia University. The present correlation was compared with various tests performed with rod bundles with wire wrapped spacers. Application of the new CHF correlation to conditions typical for an APWR shows that the predicted CHFs are smaller than those calculated with the usual PWR CHF correlations.
