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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.
Klaus Leinemann, Rainer Meyder, Horst Schnauder, Dieter Smidt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 125-130
Technical Paper | Fission Rector | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33714
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The operators of nuclear power plants are generally trained to handle a standardized set of typical accidents. This set is designed to define a package containing the event combinations that might be hypothesized. Because of the large number of hypothetical events, diagnostic ability requires continuous training. The development of, and experience with, a flexible training device is described that basically presents realtime scenarios. It could be shown that even complex events can be displayed successfully. Real plant transients as well as those calculated with sophisticated computer codes can be displayed. Test sessions with responsible technical personnel at reactor plants in the Federal Republic of Germany demonstrated the capabilities of the system.
