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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.
Benjamin Rouben, Eleodor Nichita
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 10 | October 2021 | Pages 1633-1638
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1827884
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Throughout the years, various reports and training manuals on CANada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactors have mentioned that the CANDU lattice is overmoderated. Overmoderation is not always defined in such documents but often appears associated with the positive void reactivity of the CANDU lattice. Some documents refer, logically, to overmoderation as meaning that the lattice pitch is larger than the pitch that maximizes the infinite-lattice multiplication constant but do not demonstrate this is the case for CANDU. We demonstrate that in fact, the CANDU lattice is undermoderated; that is, the current 28.575-cm lattice pitch is smaller than the pitch for which the infinite-lattice multiplication constant reaches its maximum. We hypothesize that the misconception of CANDU overmoderation may have originated from attributing the CANDU positive void reactivity to too much moderator by incorrectly equating the effect of losing heavy water coolant with the effect of losing heavy water moderator.
