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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.
Ming Zhi Huang, Chong Zhou, Pu Yang, Wei Shi Wan, Zuo Kang Lin, Ye Dai
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages 15-36
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2096390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The existing thermal neutron molten salt reactor design has a complicated online processing system that has many technical difficulties. A thorium-based molten salt fast energy amplifier (TMSFEA) driven by a proton accelerator can operate stably for nearly 40 years at a rated thermal power of 300 MW without online processing. In order to simplify the core structure of TMSFEA, the core design is based on a hollow and moderator-free cylindrical geometry. The molten salt in the core serves as both fuel salt and spallation target. In this paper, based on the previous TMSFEA core neutron physics design, the core thermal-hydraulic design principles of TMSFEA are proposed, and a detailed core design with specific core structures as well as three-dimensional core thermal-hydraulic performance are obtained. Through computational fluid dynamics steady-state analysis, the arrangement of the core inlet and outlet and the shape of the core sidewall are optimized. Suitable distribution plates and skirt plates are proposed, and two corresponding lower plenum structures are designed to improve the flow field in the core. This study provides TMSFEA with core structures that meet the thermal-hydraulic design principles and also provides ideas for similar hollow reactor core designs.
