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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.
Ara Go, Daesik Yook, Kyuhwan Jeong, GyeongMi Kim, GunHee Jung, Ser Gi Hong
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 4 | April 2019 | Pages 605-623
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1500795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Basic Plan for High-Level Radioactive Waste Management (national WM plan) was established and promulgated, taking into consideration national and international trends on policy and technology development. In order to evaluate the safety for a facility in accordance with the national WM plan, it is essential to evaluate the spent nuclear fuel (SNF) source term. The objective of this study was to analyze Korea SNF characteristics; to propose reference SNF; and to evaluate generation amounts, radioactivity, thermal power, and isotopic composition of SNF in compliance with the national WM plan in order to provide basic information for safety research in Korea. The Automatic Multi-batch ORIGEN Runner for Evaluation of Spent fuel program (AMORES) was developed and used to evaluate inventory, radioactivity, and thermal power. Generation amounts, radioactivity, thermal power, and isotopic composition of SNF for milestones in the national WM plan were evaluated using a pressurized water reactor SNF database (DB) through 2015, and future SNF generation was estimated by taking into consideration the distribution of initial enrichment and burnup for each power plant unit. As a result, radioactivity, thermal power, and isotopic composition at each site in 2015, 2052, and 2082 differed significantly depending on the presence of new nuclear power plants. In addition, a reference SNF was proposed through statistical analysis of the SNF DB in order to utilize it for safety analysis based on various scenarios when actual SNF data cannot be available. In order to perform a more realistic safety assessment, radionuclide inventories using reference SNF and time-integrated SNF nuclide inventories using actual data were compared, and then, the best-fit reference SNF for each site and year was suggested.
