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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.
L. E. Herranz, F. Sánchez, S. Gupta
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 1523-1536
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2122679
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The removal of aerosol particles and vapors in gas bubbles moving through a water pool is known to be an efficient means to reduce source term to the environment during severe accidents, as happened in Fukushima Daiichi. This trapping, called pool scrubbing, entails a complex phenomenology in which hydrodynamics, thermal hydraulics, and aerosol physics strongly affect each other and determine the net transfer of radioactivity coming out from the aqueous pond. More than 20 experimental programs have addressed this issue since the early 1980s, but few of them did it in a systematic and representative way. This paper thoroughly reviews the entire pool scrubbing database until 2016 and assesses the adequacy of the experimental setup, representativeness of boundary conditions, weaknesses in decontamination factor derivation, data uncertainties, and some other aspects to finally synthesize a reduced number of experiments that could be used as an experimental matrix for the validation of pool scrubbing models. More than 500 tests were reviewed and classified as Qualified for Validation, Useful for Understanding, or Not Useful; less than 15% of these experiments are considered in the proposed validation matrix due to different reasons. Major insights and remaining needs are also highlighted. This work was conducted under the framework of the Integration of Pool Scrubbing Research to Enhance Source-Term Calculations, or the IPRESCA project, led by Becker Technologies, in the framework of the Sustainable Nuclear Energy Technology Platform/Nuclear Generation II & III Alliance/Technical Area 2.