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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. Pun-Quach, P. Sermer, F. M. Hoppe, O. Nainer, B. Phan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 170-183
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 14th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-14) / Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15765
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a best estimate plus uncertainty (BEPU) methodology applied to dryout, or critical channel power (CCP), modeling based on a Monte Carlo approach. This method involves the identification of the sources of uncertainty and the development of error models for the characterization and separation of epistemic and aleatory uncertainties associated with the CCP parameter. Furthermore, the proposed method facilitates the use of actual operational data leading to improvements over traditional methods, such as sensitivity analysis, which assume parametric models that may not accurately capture the possible complex statistical structures in the system input and responses.