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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.
Takuya Yamashita, Takeshi Honda, Masato Mizokami, Kenichiro Nozaki, Hiroyuki Suzuki, Marco Pellegrini, Takeshi Sakai, Ikken Sato, Shinya Mizokami
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 902-927
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2157663
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The estimation and understanding of the state of fuel debris and fission products inside the plant is an essential step in the decommissioning of the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (1F). However, the direct observation of the plant interior, which is under a high radiation environment, is difficult and limited. Therefore, in order to understand the plant interior conditions, a comprehensive analysis and evaluation are necessary, based on various measurement data from the plant, analysis of plant data during the accident progression phase, and information obtained from computer simulations for this phase. These evaluations can be used to estimate the conditions of the interior of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) and the primary containment vessel (PCV). Herein, 1F Unit 3 is addressed as the subject to produce an estimated diagram of the fuel debris distribution from data obtained about the RPV and PCV based on the comprehensive evaluation of various measurement data and information obtained from the accident progression analysis, which were released to the public in November 2022.
