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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.
Igor A. Bolotnov
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 1405-1413
Review Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2232222
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The significant progress in the last decade of high-resolution single- and two-phase flow simulations of reactor-relevant flows is summarized in this review paper. The rapid development of high-performance computing capabilities creates exciting opportunities to study complex reactor thermal-hydraulic phenomena. Today’s advances in thermal-hydraulic analysis, interface capturing simulations, and advanced data processing and analysis approaches will help pave the way to the next level of understanding of two-phase flow behavior in nuclear reactors.
This paper discusses two major topics: (1) a brief review of interface-capturing simulations in recent years and (2) several opportunities to advance these numerical research tools in the future. The first part discusses typical computational methods used for these simulations and provides some examples of past work, as well as computational cost estimates and affordability of such simulations for research and industrial applications. In the second part, some specific examples are discussed that could be analyzed using exascale supercomputers being designed and projected to be online in the next several years. New-generation methodologies are required to take full advantage of these capabilities to greatly enhance the scientific understanding of complex two-phase flow phenomena in various conditions relevant to industrial applications.
