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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.
Shawn R. Jensen, Aaron E. Craft, Glen C. Papaioannou, Wyatt W. Empie, Blaine R. Ward, Lee A. Batt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1325-1335
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1605780
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) radiography system is used to perform neutron radiography of fuels, experiments, and other specimens before and after irradiation within the TREAT reactor. The TREAT neutron radiography facility performed approximately 5000 radiographs by the spring of 1977. Originally built in 1958, the TREAT Facility was in operation until it was placed in a shutdown status in 1994. Following the Fukishima disaster and seeing a need for enhanced accident-tolerant fuels, the U.S. Department of Energy decided to restart the TREAT Facility and resume transient operations. In November 2017, the TREAT reactor was successfully restarted and is currently performing operational testing in preparation for initial experiment irradiations and transient testing. This paper discusses efforts to reactivate the TREAT neutron radiography facility. To characterize the neutron beam, gold foil activation measurements were made to determine an average neutron flux and flux profile. An open beam image provides the information about variations in the beam profile. A series of system qualification radiographs have been acquired to determine the effective image acquisition parameters, resulting image quality, and the relationships between the two.
