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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.
Benjamin Wellons, Rishya Sankar Kumaran, Sanghun Lee, Shikha Prasad
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages 69-81
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2108686
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An open-source code RadSigPro 1.0 has been developed and used for fast processing of nanosecond-long pulses from scintillation detectors. This processing includes pulse height distribution (PHD), pulse shape discrimination (PSD), and time of flight (TOF). The code has been implemented onto the programmable logic design of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) design for on-the-fly processing of neutron and gamma-ray pulses. A weighted average of the percent difference of the results for RadSigPro 1.0 implemented on a CPU and a FPGA logic design is calculated. This shows a 0% difference for the PHD data sets, a 0.458% and 0.344% difference for the designated gamma detector and neutron detector PSD data sets, respectively, and a 0% difference for the TOF data set. When the FPGA logic design is applied and simulated, it computed the total and tail pulse areas within 5 ns of the arrival of the final data point used for accumulation and also captured the pulse height value within 2 ns of the arrival of the pulse’s maximum data point.
