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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.
B. P. Bromley, A. V. Colton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1193-1215
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1853466
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lattice physics and core physics studies have been carried out to investigate the reactor physics feasibility of destroying americium (Am) and curium (Cm) using special target fuel bundles in blanket fuel channels in a heterogeneous seed-blanket pressure tube heavy water reactor (PT-HWR) core fueled primarily with natural uranium. Results indicate that it should be feasible to achieve net-zero production of Am in a single PT-HWR core using 10 to 16 dedicated blanket channels containing Am-based target bundles while only one dedicated blanket channel would be required for achieving net-zero production of Cm. While the use of target blanket fuel bundles with fuel elements made of Am or Cm mixed with thorium (Th) in oxide form ((Am,Th)O2, (Cm,Th)O2) is expected to be suitable for transmutation purposes, the use of fuel elements made of pure americium oxide, especially those in the form of AmO1.55, may not be suitable for transmutation purposes because of potential issues with fuel melting under high-power operations or postulated accident scenarios. The potential to achieve net-zero production of Am and Cm in a single thermal-spectrum reactor, such as a PT-HWR, could help eliminate the need to build and qualify a deep geological repository (DGR) capable of storing minor actinides for a long time (>1 million years). At the very least, the size and/or number of DGRs required for storing radioactive waste could be reduced significantly. Thus, destroying Am and Cm in PT-HWRs could be regarded as a viable solution to the perceived problem of nuclear waste and may help improve public acceptance of the use of nuclear energy. In addition, it may be possible to apply a similar approach for destroying MAs in other Generation III+ (Gen-III+)/Generation IV (Gen-IV)/small modular reactor (SMR) technologies.
