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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.
Axel Hoefer, Oliver Buss, Michael Schmid
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1578-1587
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1560784
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A general Bayesian framework for best-estimate plus uncertainty predictions of multidimensional continuous observables is presented. Parameterizing uncertainties in terms of multivariate normal distribution models, this Multivariate normal Bayesian model (MNBM) framework allows one to include both measured data and linear constraints in a mathematically consistent way. The resulting updating formulas are generalizations of the updating formulas of the Generalized Linear Least Squares (GLLS) framework, which is widely used for the generation of adjusted nuclear data libraries. While the GLLS methodology is restricted to first-order perturbation theory, there is no such restriction for the considered MNBM framework. This makes it possible to use Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation and to apply the updating formulas directly to the observables of interest without having to first update the input parameter distributions. After a general presentation of the MNBM framework and a brief discussion of its possible applications, the generation of bounding burnup-dependent axial burnup profiles of light water reactor fuel assemblies for the purpose of criticality safety analysis is discussed as an example application.