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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.
Abdelfatah Abdelmaksoud, Hesham Elbakhshawangy, Mohamed Abdelaziz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 857-871
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2158667
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the present work, a numerical study of inward and outward buckling of two successive fuel plates of a typical material testing reactor is investigated using computational fluid dynamics code. Fuel plate buckling results in partial blockage of the hot channel. Both buckling toward the inside and outside are considered. Simulations are conducted for different blockage levels of the nominal flow area, i.e., 0%, 20%, 40%, 50%, 60%, and 70% for inward buckling. Blockage levels of 0%, 20%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and 90% are considered for outward buckling. The impact of the flow field redistribution in four successive channels on the cooling capacity of each channel is investigated. The obtained results show that for an inward buckling ratio greater than 50%, critical phenomena will occur that could affect the clad integrity. Moreover, for inward buckling of 70%, the maximum clad temperature in the blocked channel reaches the value associated with the onset of nucleate boiling at the operating pressure. On the other hand, for outward buckling of 90%, critical phenomena that could affect the clad integrity will occur.
