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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.
Yusuke Ohashi, Masamitsu Shimaike, Takashi Matsumoto, Nobuo Takahashi, Kaoru Yokoyama, Yasuyuki Morimoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 777-786
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2145136
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the Ningyo-Toge Environmental Engineering Center, technical developments related to uranium refining conversion and enrichment have been completed and decommissioning of these facilities has begun. The error between the quantity of dismantled materials estimated from the facility design drawings and the actual quantity of the dismantled materials was about 1.7% when averaged over the entire facilities already dismantled. Most of the dismantled materials, which have no contamination history and were properly managed, were confirmed to have surface radioactivity concentrations below the detection limit and could be carried out to recyclers as nonradioactive (NR) waste. The dismantled materials that could not be certified as NR needed to be cleared and reused. By evaluating two types of gamma rays of 234mPa from the mockup dismantled objects, it was found that uranium corresponding to a clearance level (1.2 × 102 Bq/kg) could be quantified.
