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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.
Pan Wu, David Novog
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 364-376
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1495000
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CTF code is a subchannel thermal-hydraulic code developed based on the COBRA-TF code. In this work, the CTF code is used to predict the single- and two-phase heat transfer, pressure drop, onset of nucleate boiling, and dryout heat flux in water at several temperatures and pressures under steady-state and transient conditions. The conditions cover a range of pressures from 2 to 6 MPa, flows from 1000 to 2500 kg/(m2∙s), and inlet subcooling from 40°C to 70°C. Experimental heat balance tests show agreement between coolant enthalpy change and the electrical power with a difference of no more than 1.0%. Steady-state experiments were performed at constant inlet conditions in a cylindrical directly heated Inconel test section where the wall temperatures were measured at each power level. For each steady-state test, the experimental boiling curve is compared to CTF predictions. Transient experiments were performed by initiating a blowdown from the test section outlet plenum using a fast-acting valve with an open time of less than 100 ms. The time of dryout in these transient experiments is compared with the CTF results to clarify the pressure transient effect on the dryout prediction.