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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.
Tomasz Skorek
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1540-1553
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1580532
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The input uncertainties propagation methods are the most frequently applied statistical methods in uncertainty analyses. Among them, particularly popular are the methods based on Wilks’ formula. Numerous studies on uncertainty analyses show that the identification and quantification of input uncertainties is a major problem with uncertainty analyses. Among input uncertainties evaluation, the identification and quantification of physical model uncertainties in thermal-hydraulic codes appear to be particularly difficult.
This paper deals with this problem by proposing inherent model uncertainties quantification by code developers in the frame of code development and validation. The introduction of the extended code validation would not only contribute to potential uncertainty analyses, solving to a large degree the problem of model uncertainties quantification, but also contribute to code validation, and as a consequence, improve the safety issues. A not-negligible factor is also better management of the resources. Instead of uncertainty quantification repeatedly performed by each user, the quantification could be performed once and, in addition, by experts having the required know-how.
Introducing this new standard in code validation would require additional effort from the code developers but integral quantification of the model uncertainties would be profitable also for code development. In fact, by code development, in particular if the model is own development of the team, such an accuracy (or uncertainty) evaluation is usually performed. The additional effort, in this case, would be to describe the present information in the form of probability distribution functions or at least in the form of ranges.