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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.
Yukiharu Ohga, Kohyu Fukunishi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | November 1985 | Pages 402-410
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33692
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An on-line method of predicting reactor water level and pressure under small loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA) conditions has been proposed. The method features initialization of a simplified reactor model in transient conditions. This is done by using plant data in time series and estimating unknown parameters, such as break area, by a nonlinear optimization method. Off-line simulations were performed for small LOCAs (break area: ∼100 cm2) using the results of a reference LOCA analysis code for plant data. These showed that the difference from the reference calculation during a 10-min period was within 10%, normalized by the value at the initialization time, and the estimation error for break area was below 11%. The overall CPU time required for the prediction was below 10 s in a general purpose computer of 10 million instructions per second.
