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August 2025
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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.
Myoung-Suk Kang, Gyunyoung Heo, Young-Seok Lee, Hyuck Jong Kim
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 1-8
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12397
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper surveyed the safety issues and the related engineered safety features for designing Korean demonstration fusion power plant. Since the design process was staying at a conceptual stage and regulatory requirements were not fully matured, it was significant to investigate the broad options and select feasible candidates. In order to straddle system's performance and risk, the study followed the principles of Axiomatic Design (AD) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). The interplay of AD and FTA facilitates developing the design of fusion power plants for enhancing performance (power generation) and reducing risk (radiation hazard). While AD is a synthesis process in the success domain to compromise functional requirements and design options in terms of a functional hierarchy tree, FTA considers a safety analysis process in the failure domain. The functional hierarchy tree, which is also named as a functional requirement and design parameter tree, showed the entire fusion power plant with multiple design candidates in a hierarchic manner. This tree can be transformed into a fault tree. While developing the fault tree, the list of DBAs which are the failure modes for the leaves of the fault tree could be recognized, and the associated engineered safety features were proposed depending on the consequences of a DBA. As a demonstration for analyzing a DBA, the mass and energy release calculation for in-vessel loss of coolant accident was described.