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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.
D. Mandelli, C. Smith, T. Riley, J. Nielsen, A. Alfonsi, J. Cogliati, C. Rabiti, J. Schroeder
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 161-174
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-142
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The existing fleet of nuclear power plants is in the process of having its lifetime extended and having the power generated from these plants increased via power uprates and improved operations. In order to evaluate the impact of these factors on the safety of the plant, the Risk-Informed Safety Margin Characterization (RISMC) pathway aims to provide insights to decision makers through a series of simulations of the plant dynamics for different initial conditions and accident scenarios. This paper presents a case study in order to show the capabilities of the RISMC methodology to assess the impact of power uprate of a boiling water reactor system during a station blackout accident scenario. We employ a system simulator code, RELAP5-3D, coupled with RAVEN, which performs the stochastic analysis. Our analysis is performed by (a) sampling values from a set of parameters from the uncertainty space of interest, (b) simulating the system behavior for that specific set of parameter values, and (c) analyzing the outcomes from the set of simulation runs.
