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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.
Jinzhao Zhang, Adrien Dethioux, Andriy Kovtonyuk, Christophe Schneidesch
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 140-152
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1516055
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency PREMIUM [Post-BEMUSE (Best-Estimate Methods Uncertainty and Sensitivity Evaluation) REflood Model Input Uncertainty Methods] benchmark (2012–2015), Tractebel has contributed to the development and the proof-of-concept application of a sampling-based inverse uncertainty quantification (IUQ) approach with the DAKOTA statistical uncertainty and sensitivity analysis tool. This IUQ approach has been applied to quantify the RELAP5/MOD3.3 reflood-related model input uncertainties, based on selected reflood tests [FEBA (Flooding Experiments with Blocked Arrays) and PERICLES]. This paper presents the Tractebel IUQ approach as well as the results of applications to the PREMIUM benchmark. Lessons learned and perspectives for future development are also discussed.
