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Conference Spotlight
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.
L. M. Gaspar, D. A. Giordano, N. A. Greenfield, S. J. Kim, F. A. Kubic, M. R. Middlemas, A. J. Pizarro, W. J. Saeger, K. M. Sweetland, R. S. Reid
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages S73-S91
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1997540
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The eBlock37 is a subscale electrically heated and heat-pipe-cooled prototype of a fast spectrum microreactor that is under development at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The prototype consists of an electrically heated core and gas-cooled heat exchanger. These subassemblies, both built from 316 L stainless steel, are thermally linked by an array of 37 sodium heat pipes that transfer a nominal 100 kW from the core at 700°C. An overarching objective of this effort is to overcome challenges associated with core block and heat exchanger manufacture and integration of high-temperature heat pipes into the assembly. Components that would be safety critical in an actual reactor, such as the heat pipe wicks, are being built under a Nuclear Quality Assurance 1 quality program. The completed assembly is intended for non-nuclear electrically heated testing, which will be conducted at a demonstration facility at Idaho National Laboratory. This paper provides a top-level summary of the efforts to date.