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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.
Tai-Hung Wu, De-Cheng Chen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 6 | June 2019 | Pages 867-880
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1533320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Station blackout (SBO) sequences for a Westinghouse-designed three-loop pressurized water reactor (PWR) with large dry containment are investigated. Recovery of alternating-current power is considered under two separate headings in event trees of loss of off-site power: recovery of the off-site power and recovery of the emergency diesel generators (EDGs) or diesel generator 5. A reactor coolant pump seal leakage model under SBO conditions for a Westinghouse PWR with high-temperature O-rings is used. Seal failure mechanisms, including popping open, binding, and O-ring extrusion, are considered. Success criteria are established based on the results of thermal-hydraulic calculations via the MELCOR and/or RELAP-5 codes. Furthermore, the WinNUPRA software package is used for sequence quantification.
Three primary models are addressed: Basic, WOG2000, and Ultimate Response Guideline (URG). The core damage frequency (CDF) of SBO sequences for the Basic model is found to be very optimistic and underestimated. The improvement on CDF by introducing the URG model is found to be dependent primarily on the reliability of plant operators in performing the procedure URG under SBO situations.
Two sensitivity analyses on the passive shutdown seal (PSDS) are performed: WOG2000 (PSDS) and URG (PSDS). The low-failure-probability PSDS results in a >94% improvement in CDF due to SBO since the CDF contribution from long-term SBO sequences becomes negligible. Furthermore, the URG strategies are shown to have a significant impact on the reduction of CDF since seal leakage is no longer a concern in the presence of the PSDS.
The way that power recovered is distinguished from off-site power or on-site EDGs and the way that SBO CDF is assessed make the present study more realistic than general SBO models.
A key analysis of the confidence bands of the SBO CDF with the aid of the uncertainty measure is also performed to observe the induced effects by the probabilistic seal failure modes and PSDS.
