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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.
Wei Xu, Jianhua Xia, Xiaojing Liu, Xu Cheng, Wei Zeng
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 281-296
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1457887
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Bottom reflooding is the third phase when a large-break loss-of-coolant accident occurs. Due to the complexity and importance, especially in a distinct narrow rectangular channel, various research methods can be utilized to understand the whole process. Test facility is established to figure out the thermal-hydraulic behaviors during bottom reflooding, and the acquisition of accurate solid temperature is essential. The inverse heat transfer problem method is applied to take full advantage of experimental data. In addition, a bottom reflooding transient (BRT) code is utilized to calculate various parameters conveniently. A three-dimensional heat conduction equation for a transient state is solved implicitly to obtain solid temperature distribution, surface heat flux, and heat transfer coefficient at the cooling surface. The simulation results of the BRT code are compared with that of RELAP5, an available system code, and the experimental results. A conclusion that can be derived is that the BRT code shows good applicability of simulating bottom reflooding in a narrow rectangular channel.
