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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.
Can Liao, Haori Yang, Zhengzhi Liu, Jason P. Hayward
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 736-747
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1522885
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents the design of a position-sensitive detector that we are evaluating for cosmic-ray muon imaging. The position-sensitive detector consists of an EJ-200 plastic scintillator panel that is 32 × 32 × 2.5 cm in dimension. A quantity of 32 parallel grooves, each 2 mm wide and 4 mm deep with a pitch of 1 cm, are carved on the top and bottom sides, in perpendicular orientation, of a scintillator panel. Two wavelength shifting optical fibers are embedded in each groove for light collection and transport. The optical fibers from each channel are coupled to one pixel of a Hamamatsu H8500C multi-anode photomultiplier tube. An encoding technique using a one-dimensional resistor network was developed to reduce the number of required readout channels for position determination. The position calibration was performed with a blue light emitting diode. The detector was shown to achieve position resolution of ~1 cm (sigma).