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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.
Yunfei Zhao, Xiaoxu Diao, Jonathon Huang, Carol Smidts
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 8 | August 2019 | Pages 1021-1034
Technical Paper – Special section on Big Data for Nuclear Power Plants | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1580967
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A large number of licensee event reports are available in the nuclear power generation sector. A comprehensive analysis of the reports will provide valuable insights for improving nuclear power plant operation and safety. However, the free-text format of the reports poses great challenges to the analysis of the tens of thousands of reports generated. To address this issue, we propose an automated method for the analysis based on natural language processing techniques. Specifically, the objective is to automatically extract the causal relationships from free-text reports. The proposed method relies on a set of keywords that indicates causal relationships and the rules associated with the keywords for identifying the causal relationships, both of which can be identified based on manual analysis of sampled reports and sentences. The rules are described using the parts of speech of the words in a sentence and the dependencies between these words. The keywords and the rules constitute a rule-based expert system, Causal Relationship Identification (CaRI). The proposed method is applied to the analysis of the abstract section of the reports from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Licensee Event Report database. We identified 11 keywords and developed 184 rules. The developed system, CaRI, is tested and the result shows that 86% of the causal relationships in the test data can be captured automatically. Application of the proposed method is foreseen in a number of areas, for instance, in the analysis of performance-shaping factors and in reconstruction of the scenario in an event.