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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.
Donna Post Guillen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages S21-S40
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2055701
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Microreactors, or very small, transportable or mobile nuclear reactors with a capacity of less than 20 MW(thermal), are being developed to provide heat and power for myriad applications in remote areas, military installations, emergency operations, humanitarian missions, and disaster relief zones. A wide variety of reactor types are under consideration, including sodium-cooled fast reactors, molten-salt reactors, very high-temperature gas reactors, and heat pipe reactors. One issue common to all microreactor designs is the need to remove heat from the core. The objective of this paper is to identify a spectrum of diverse approaches to thermal management that can be used develop advanced, high-performance heat removal systems to further enhance the expected performance of a 1- to 20-MW(thermal) nuclear reactor. The focus here is on concepts that can provide a passive means of heat removal and are new to nuclear reactors. Different types of passive heat removal strategies for microreactors are examined, including latent heat-transfer devices, such as various types of heat pipes, natural convection and conduction-radiation cooling, and other thermal devices, such as thermoelectrics and thermoacoustics, that can be used to provide power for auxiliary cooling. Many of these concepts have already been fielded in renewable energy systems. Concepts at different stages of technical maturity are outlined to present ideas that can push the boundaries of thermal management in present-day nuclear technology. Practical considerations relative to the integration of these concepts into nuclear systems are given.