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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.
Pola Lydia Lagari, Styliani Pantopoulou, Miltos Alamaniotis, Lefteri H. Tsoukalas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1270-1279
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1816743
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since radionuclides have unique characteristic gamma-ray spectra, usually maintained as a set of (energy, counts/energy) ordered pairs, an explicit functional representation would be indisputably useful. In this paper, the Gamma Detector Response and Analysis Software has been used to simulate the gamma-ray spectra as it would be collected by an NaI detector for a set of 70 radionuclides. Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) networks that offer simple, closed-form expressions are then trained to represent each of these spectra. Hence, a library consisting of 70 RBF networks for the corresponding radionuclides has been built. The presence of these library-contained radionuclides in a given gamma-ray spectrum of an unknown source is identified by an algorithm that employs a linear combination of the library spectra to approximate the unknown spectrum. The combination coefficients are then determined by minimizing the squared deviation error function under convexity constraints.
