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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.
Fatih Ekinci, Erkan Bostanci, Mehmet Serdar Güzel, Özlem Dagli
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1229-1239
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2188144
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Biomaterials are indispensable elements for improving human health and quality of life. Applications of biomaterials include the use of phantoms as tissue replacement in diagnostics (biosensors), medical supplies (blood bags and surgical instruments), therapeutic treatments (medical implants and devices), regenerative medicine (tissue engineered skin and cartilage), and radiation dosimetric studies. Since polymers are organic, they offer a much more versatile usage area than metals and ceramic biomaterials, particularly in soft tissue substitutes. The wide physical, mechanical, and chemical properties provided by polymers have encouraged extensive research, development, and application of polymeric biomaterials. Their usage as a soft tissue phantom is at the forefront of these applications.
In this study, the ionization, recoils, phonon release, collision events, and lateral straggle properties of polymeric biomaterials [e.g., polymethylmetacrylate (PMMA), polystyrene, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinylchloride] closest to soft tissue are investigated in carbon therapy application. The Brag peak location achieved for PMMA is quite close to that of soft tissue, within 4.8%, average recoils within 0.5%, and collision event parameter within 0.6%, however, lateral scattering is comparatively larger by roughly 6.8%, according to TRIM-based Monte Carlo simulation results. Thus, when carbon ion is taken into account, the current findings show that PMMA is one of the possible polymeric biomaterials to simulate soft tissue in terms of radiation interaction properties.