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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.
R. G. Abrefah, P. A. A. Essel
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1245-1250
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1585736
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The high-enriched-uranium core of the Ghana Research Reactor-1 has been removed and replaced by low-enriched-uranium fuel. Some components of the reactor that were not transported to China as part of the Chinese take-back program will be managed and stored in Ghana. The amount of decay heat and activity in these components were estimated using the ORIGEN-S code in order to select the best waste management option and to protect the personnel that will handle these components. The results obtained showed relatively low decay heat and activity in the reactor components that were considered in this study.
