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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.
Xiangyun Zhou, Annan Zhou, De’An Sun, Daichao Sheng
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 247-262
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1756161
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The temperature field in a nuclear waste repository is an important issue with regard to the design and safety assessment of the repository. In this paper, a double-layer model for simulating the heat conduction near a single waste canister is established, and then, by applying the Laplace transform to the governing equations of the heat conduction in the buffer layer and the surrounding rock, the solutions of the temperature field are obtained in the Laplace domain. The temperature distribution near the nuclear waste canister is presented by numerical inversion of the solutions using Crump’s method in the time-space domain. Finally, the effects of parameters on the temperature on the canister surface are analyzed. The results show that the double-layer model of the heat conduction increases the maximum temperature on the canister surface by about 11.87°C compared to the single-layer model. The double-layer model is verified to be reliable by comparing with a line heat source model that has been verified by numerical calculations. The temperature on the canister surface is significantly affected by the burnup value and cooling time of the nuclear waste, the thickness of the buffer layer, the thermal conductivities of the buffer material and the surrounding rock, and the external boundary condition.
