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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.
Dean Wang, Ian C. Gauld, Graydon L. Yoder, Larry J. Ott, George F. Flanagan, Matthew W. Francis, Emilian L. Popov, Juan J. Carbajo, Prashant K. Jain, John C. Wagner, Jess C. Gehin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 2 | November 2012 | Pages 205-215
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14634
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A study on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station spent-fuel pool (SFP) at Unit 4 (SFP4) is presented in this paper. We discuss the design characteristics of SFP4 and its decay heat load in detail and provide a model that we developed to estimate the SFP evaporation rate based on the SFP temperature. The SFP level of SFP4 following the March 11, 2011, accident is predicted based on the fundamental conservation laws of mass and energy. Our predicted SFP level and temperatures are in good agreement with measured data and are consistent with Tokyo Electric Power Company evaluation results.
