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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
Leslie Cave, William E. Kastenberg
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 29-42
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33708
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The development and application of two quantitative methods that could be used as part of the decisionmaking process in the licensing of nuclear power plants are described. These methods are (a) the use of quantitative screening criteria to assess the adequacy of the safety functions in existing plants and (b) the use of value/impact or cost /benefit analysis to determine limits to the cost-effective expenditure on“back-fitting” to improve safety. It also is shown that the results obtained by the two methods are not necessarily compatible with one another. As an example, the two methods are applied to the question of improving the decay heat removal function for light water reactors. Screening criteria are presented for this function for both pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors. The value/impact assessment is carried out as a function of site population, existing plant features, and new plant features.
