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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.
Nicolò Badodi, Antonio Cammi, Marica Eboli, Daniele Martelli, Alessandro Del Nevo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 1508-1522
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2188984
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A major safety concern addressed during the design of the water-cooled lead-lithium (PbLi) breeding blanket (BB) is represented by an in-box loss-of-coolant accident, where high-pressure water is supposed to interact with PbLi inside the BB. Code development activities are being carried out to create the needed tools for the safety analysis of these systems in the case of incidental scenarios, which are supported by extensive experimental campaigns that aim at providing data for SIMMER code verification and validation (V&V). In this regard, the present work aims at presenting the dataset generated during the Series D experimental campaign performed at the LIFUS5/Mod3 facility operated at the ENEA Brasimone Research Centre. This is a separate effect facility able to simulate the mixing of water and PbLi alloy in conditions of temperature and pressure similar to the ones encountered by the system during nominal operation and to acquire significant data on all the relevant thermochemical parameters. Moreover, a preliminary analysis of the data has been performed to critically determine the quality of the data and to identify possible issues in the experimental process. In the end, the foreseen extension of the experimental work is described, as well as the foreseen application of the acquired data in the code V&V activities.