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Conference Spotlight
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.
Educational Session|Sponsored by Nuclear Supply Chain
Tuesday, August 11, 2020|12:00–1:30PM EDT
Session Organizers:
Roger Smith (Duke Energy)
Jim Ripple (Southern Nuclear)
Knowledge Manager:
Lee Causey (Duke Energy)
Inventory levels at most all of our nuclear facilities continue to grow while economic pressures would dictate better uses of the financial resources. In fact, a reduction of inventory levels is desired without inappropriately increasing operational risk to the sites. Complicating the equation on balancing of risk is the increasing obsolescence of materials, a declining supplier base, digital influx in the I&C arena, and loss of utility inventories as plants close. This session will be a workshop in which various inventory management related topics will be discussed with the goal of a white paper for utilities to use as a reference document for individual inventory optimization programs. In addition, the results of this workshop will also be reviewed at the annual Nuclear Supply Chain Strategic Leaders (NSCSL) conference to be held later this conference week. Topics to be discussed are inventory reduction success examples, use of “repair warehouses,” critical spare identifications, End-of-Life stocking algorithms, and other issues now confronting our inventory managers.
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