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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.
Robert David
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1145-1153
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2188145
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a severe accident in a CANDU reactor, disassembly of the core could produce a bed of coarse debris at the bottom of the calandria that would eventually transition into a pool of molten corium. During this process, it may be possible for small amounts of molten core material to contact the calandria wall. The transient heat flow through a calandria wall suddenly contacted by molten Zr or corium is analyzed with a finite element model. Ablation of the wall at its inner surface and the temporary increase in heat flux through its outer surface are calculated for various boundary conditions. Model calculations are compared to observations of the ablation and temperature of a stainless steel plate sprayed by prototypic corium in the Cesium Aerosol Generation-4 or CAGE-4 experiment.
