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Conference Spotlight
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.
Nicolas Woolstenhulme, Clint Baker, Colby Jensen, Daniel Chapman, Devin Imholte, Nate Oldham, Connie Hill, Spencer Snow
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1251-1265
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1590072
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test facility (TREAT) resumed operations in 2017 in order to reclaim its crucial role in nuclear-heated fuel safety research. TREAT’s historic era of operation (1959 to 1994) was best known for integral-scale testing of large fuel specimens/bundles under postulated reactor plant accident conditions, but TREAT also supported smaller-scale phenomena identification tests that elucidated fundamental behaviors and paved the way for these integral-scale tests. Advances in modern computational capabilities and a resurgence of interest in novel reactor technologies have created an opportunity for emphasizing modernized science-based and separate effects tests once again at TREAT. An innovative approach to this type of testing has been developed to leverage minor radioactivity built in during brief TREAT irradiations by arranging smaller fuel specimens in low-activation hardware so that they can be easily extracted and shipped for postirradiation examination within weeks. This recently established capability, termed the Minimal Activation Retrievable Capsule Holder (MARCH) irradiation vehicle system, includes capabilities for cost-effective simplified environment testing of centimeter-scale fuel samples of various geometries, temperature-controlled irradiations of millimeter-size samples for lower-length-scale model development, liquid metal–bonded heat sink capsules for controlling transient temperature response in fuel rodlets, and an innovative approach to high-throughput irradiation of transient sensors and instrumentation. The MARCH system’s capabilities will also set the foundation for fuel safety research performed in larger integral-scale test devices with coolant environments representing reactor plants. Based upon historic approaches, but modernized to meet current nuclear technology needs, these larger irradiation devices include flowing pressurized water (including the ability to depressurize to steam) as well liquid metal cooling loops for various fuel rod and small bundle specimens. This critical review describes the recently established MARCH system and current trajectory to enabling advanced transient science with a suite of irradiation test devices.
