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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.
S. Beetham, J. Capecelatro
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 12 | December 2023 | Pages 1977-1986
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2178251
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Turbulence in two-phase flows drives many important natural and engineering processes, from geophysical flows to nuclear power generation. Strong interphase coupling between the carrier fluid and disperse phase precludes the use of classical turbulence models developed for single-phase flows. In recent years, there has been an explosion of machine learning techniques for turbulence closure modeling, though many rely on augmenting existing models. In this work, we propose an approach that blends sparse regression and gene expression programming (GEP) to generate closed-form algebraic models from simulation data. Sparse regression is used to determine a minimum set of functional groups required to capture the physics, and GEP is used to automate the formulation of the coefficients and dependencies on operating conditions. The framework is demonstrated on homogeneous turbulent gas-particle flows in which two-way coupling generates and sustains carrier-phase turbulence.