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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.
Avinash Kumar Acharya, E. Hemanth Rao, M. Menaka, Sanjay Kumar Das, D. Ponraju, B. Venkatraman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 9 | September 2023 | Pages 1351-1364
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2199079
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sodium boiling in a fuel subassembly of a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor is a very critical phenomenon as void propagation may lead to loss of heat removal and increase in reactivity. Hence, sodium boiling behavior from the incipient stage and evolution of bubble dynamics need to be thoroughly understood toward validating various thermal-hydraulic models pertaining to safety analysis of fast reactors. An experimental program has been taken up at Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research to investigate incipient sodium boiling toward spatiotemporal evaluation of bubble characteristics in sodium. Real-time X-ray radioscopy has been employed for in-sodium visualization of bubbles generated during sodium boiling. The raw images obtained during the experiment were processed using an in-house–developed image processing algorithm that includes background subtraction, noise filtering, and segmentation techniques for enhancement of foreground features. A max filter–based tracker is also devised for clear depiction of bubble boundary and motion with time during the boiling process. Attributes like bubble diameter, nucleation site density, and bubble velocity are determined effectively from the captured images using the algorithm. The paper focuses on the experiment, imaging technique using X-ray radioscopy, and image processing toward depicting the bubble characteristics during sodium boiling in a vertical channel.