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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.
Yang Hong Jung, Seung Je Baik, Young Gwan Jin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 94-102
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1738795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A radioactive corrosion product, Chalk River unidentified deposit (crud) was sampled and analyzed using an electron probe micro-analyzer with zinc-injected spent nuclear fuel rods (HU Unit 1, actual burnup 49 655 MWd/tonne U). Hot-cell facilities, a space for handling highly radioactive materials, were used as a way to collect crud deposited in the fuel rod cladding tube at a specific location of the spent fuel rod. A soft collection method for collecting crud using rubbings or adhesive tape was used to collect a sample, and a sample was collected with hard collection using a steel knife from the cladding tube of the fuel rod. The spent fuel rods were used for two cycles burned after zinc was injected into the primary coolant, which is known to inhibit the generation of crud. To compare the analysis results of the soft and hard collection methods for sampling crud, the results of the crud collected using an ultrasonic wave system were analyzed. The crud used in this study used burned fuel rods for two cycles after zinc ions were injected into the primary coolant. Based on the results, the Ni/Fe ratio can be estimated to be about 1.18. The Ni/Fe ratio value of 1.18 derived from this study is not much different from the Ni/Fe ratio values derived from nuclear power plants operating around the world.
