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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.
Shinya Sakata et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 496-500
Plasma Engineering - Fueling and Diagnostics | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST60-496
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For a steady state operation of JT-60SA, a plasma feedback control using various diagnostic sensor signals plays an essential role. To realize this, Real-Time Diagnostic Signals acquisition System, RTDS, which utilizes PC-based real-time OS “INtime”, has been under consideration toward JT-60SA project.Real-Time Processor, RTP in JT-60 data processing system, which utilized a WS-based computer with real-time UNIX, was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, manage, and improve due to the aging of the system and the limited capability of the CPU.To solve these problems and assess the feasibility of introducing clustered architecture, a prototype had been developed with the existing RTP and a VxWorks computer at hand. Its effectiveness as the architecture of the next RTDS was verified on JT-60U experiments, but the actual RTDS will employ PC-based “INtime” system, which consist of a general-purpose personal computer and a real-time operating system “INtime”.Moreover, long-pulse experiments of more than 400s will be planned in JT-60SA project. Therefore, real time monitoring will be required as an essential function that displays acquired diagnostic signals in real-time during long-pulse experiment. This function will also be realized by utilizing the RTDS.
