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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.
K. Tasaka, Y. Koizumi, Y. Kukita, H. Nakamura, Y. Anoda, M. Iriko, H. Kumamaru, M. Suzuki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | December 1985 | Pages 628-643
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33685
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ROSA-III program has conducted system effects tests on the thermal-hydraulic response of a boiling water reactor during a loss-of-coolant accident. The performance of the emergency core cooling systems was of particular interest. As part of this program, ten tests were conducted with (a) a simulated pipe rupture located at the recirculation pump suction line, (b) a spectrum of break area ranging from 0 to 200% of scaled pipe cross-sectional area, and (c) an unavailable high-pressure core spray (HPCS) system. In these tests the pressure vessel depressurized (a) due to the actuation of the automatic depressurization system for scaled break areas of <5%, (b) due to uncovery of the inlet of the broken recirculation pump suction line for scaled break areas of >50%, and (c) due to both for the intermediate break areas between 5 and 50%. Vessel depressurization enabled the injection of emergency core coolant from the low-pressure core spray and low-pressure coolant injection system and thus led to safe recovery without HPCS. The behaviors of the vessel pressure, core mixture level, and core temperatures were fairly well reproduced by the THYDE-B1 code, based on simplified lumpedparameter models for the wide spectrum of break areas investigated.