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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.
D. Moghul, J. C. Luxat
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 104-118
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1515411
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental studies of thermal interactions of cold liquid droplets impinging on metal surfaces have been performed and the result of these studies are summarized in this paper. In these experiments rapid, energetic (explosive) breakup of the liquid drops were observed using high-speed video camera recordings. These energetic interactions occurred over a range of high temperatures of the metal surfaces and varied with the type of metal employed. Three metals were used in the study, namely, copper, brass, and stainless steel. The test sections included curved-plate (sections machined from metal cylinders) and flat-plate geometries. The choice of metals was determined by the objective of establishing the influence of thermal diffusivity of the hot material on the thermal interaction between the cold liquid droplet and the hot metal surface, and the two metal surface geometries were used to study the influence of droplet spreading behavior after impact with the hot metal surface. Metal surface temperatures ranged from 30°C to 700°C and controlled single water droplets at a temperature of 25°C were released from a specially designed rig employing a small fast–opening/closing solenoid valve. Experimental results are presented in this paper that demonstrate the processes that occur during the interaction of the droplet with the hot metal surface during a time frame of 1 to 20 ms.
