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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.
Abdellatif M. Yacout, Kun Mo, Aaron Oaks, Michael Billone, Yinbin Miao, Jeffrey Alicz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages S109-S122
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2105779
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Metallic fuel is proposed for use in various advanced sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) designs, including small modular reactors and microreactors. To support advanced SFR research and development, a metallic fuel database has been developed at Argonne National Laboratory. The database was built on extensive metallic fuel data collected during the Integral Fast Reactor Program, mainly from irradiation experiments in the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II). In order to manage the large amount of data and associated documents and to qualify the data, a Quality Assurance Program Plan (QAPP) was established for the legacy metallic fuel data following the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Nuclear Quality Assurance (NQA-1) 2008/2009 Addenda Standard. Metallic fuel data qualification is being performed following the QAPP. The plan has been approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and can be referenced in licensing applications for nuclear power plants. The process for qualifying metallic fuel data is presented. The structure for implementing the QAPP and the qualification methods are introduced. The principle for prioritizing the metallic fuel data for quality assurance is summarized. An overview of the metallic fuel data available and considered for qualification is also provided.
