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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.
Rakesh Chawla, Walter Seifritz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 228-235
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33721
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The application of a symbiosis between light water reactors (LWRs) and 235U-Pu advanced pressurized water reactors (APWRs) has been found to have certain positive features as a strategy interim to the introduction of fast breeders and Pu-Udepl APWRs. On the basis of a particular model for the two-component system, it has been quantitatively shown how, as a result of the lower Pufiss inventory of the 235U-Pu APWR as well as its self-sufficiency in plutonium, the installed APWR capacity can grow faster than is the case for Pu-Udepl APWRs. The benefits, however, are to be realized at the expense of an increased absolute uranium ore consumption, since the 235U-Pu APWR does require a finite enriched-uranium feed. While, from the point of view of global energy policy, the fast breeder clearly holds the key to a nuclear generating capacity in the terawatt(electric) range, the present delays in its large-scale commercialization render it important to evaluate the pros and cons of alternative interim strategies. It is seen that such evaluations need to be made from the twin viewpoints of (a) improved uranium utilization, relative to standard L WRs, and (b) the quantities of effectively “stored” fissile plutonium.