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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.
Yuichi Murai, Masaaki Ishikawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 12 | December 2023 | Pages 1939-1952
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2174344
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Slug flow characteristics in helically coiled tubes were investigated in experiments. Pressure loss, slug velocity, and slug passing frequency were measured using pressure transducers and backlight imaging of dyed water under illumination. For a 20-mm-diameter tube, parametric dependencies on gas and liquid volume flow rates for total superficial velocities of up to 6 m/s with three different radii of curvature (R = 0.270 m, R = 0.375 m, and R = infinity/straight tube) were explored. The main experimental results obtained are (1) the bubbly flow regime shrinks because of centrifugal acceleration from the coiled geometry, (2) the liquid slug length remains unchanged regardless of changes in gas and liquid flow rates, and (3) the pipe friction factor decreases with slug passing frequency.
