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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.
Dawn E. Janney, Steven L. Hayes, Cynthia A. Adkins
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1387-1415
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1578573
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The U-Pu-Zr metallic fuels contain multiple phases whose properties and distributions evolve due to factors such as fission, nuclear transmutation, and elemental redistribution under the influence of chemical and thermal gradients. An understanding of experimental data about phases, phase relationships, and phase properties in the U-Pu-Zr system is needed to enable mechanistic modeling of these phenomena and guide future research.
Although U-Pu-Zr alloys have been investigated for more than 60 years, relatively little reliable experimental information is available. Information about the technologically important alloy U-20Pu-10Zr (weight percent) is even more limited. The U-Pu-Zr alloys are difficult materials to study experimentally, and it is therefore important to understand what results have already been obtained, how reliable they are, and where they were reported.
This critical review provides a thorough compilation and critical assessment of the available experimental data involving properties of U-Pu-Zr phases, phase transitions, and phase diagrams, with particular attention to alloys with compositions close to U-20Pu-10Zr (weight percent). It is intended as a resource for fuel designers and modelers and a guide for prioritizing future experimental work.