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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.
Bin Han, Bao-Wen Yang, Cen Wei, Yudong Zha
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 68-76
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1506658
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spacer grid is one of the most important parts of a fuel assembly for enhancing thermal-hydraulic performance. The mixing vane is a critical component of the spacer grid (or mixing vane grid) to produce lateral flow, turbulence, vortex, and other mixing mechanisms downstream of the grid. The design and arrangement of mixing vanes could influence the flow condition downstream, especially the lateral flow and vortex surrounding the rod bundle, which directly affect not only the hydraulics and heat transfer but also the critical heat flux. Understanding fundamental mixing characteristics is of great importance for fuel assembly design. Instead of using complicated geometries, this paper studies the lateral flow velocity and vortex in a simple 2 × 1 channel with a spacer grid in order to obtain the behavior of a single mixing vane and its effect on the downstream lateral velocity and vortex. Then, the effect of mixing vane arrangements on pressure drop is studied by researching the lateral velocity and vortex in the 2 × 1 channel with two mixing vanes. Several indexes that could reflect the mixing characteristics, such as lateral velocity and vortex, are introduced to assess the performance of the mixing vanes. Because of the presence of walls in both the experiment and the simulation, the lateral flow will reflect upon the impact of the obstruction walls or rods, which would cause vortex rotation. Rotation time and flow pattern are also studied in this paper. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are carried out to obtain the lateral velocity, the vortex angle, and its period of rotation. This work may be applied to the design and optimization of mixing vanes.