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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.
J. I. Katz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | December 2021 | Pages S326-S334
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1927627
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Enrico Fermi estimated the yield of the Trinity test to be about 10 kt by dropping small pieces of paper and observing their motion in the blast wave. This is about 40% of the radiochemically derived value of kt that necessarily includes thermal and nuclear radiation that do not contribute to the blast. Although this story is classic, there appears to be no account of how he related his observation to the yield. This paper attempts to reconstruct how he might have done so.
