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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.
V. B. Morozov, A. E. Kiselev, A. A. Kiselev, K. S. Dolganov, D. Yu. Tomashchik, S. N. Krasnoperov
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 204-216
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1767998
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper considers the issues of safety assessment of new nuclear power plant (NPP) projects with VVER Generation III+ reactors in relation to the probability target for large release, which is subject to verification in the development of a full-scale Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) Level 2. The design solutions implemented in Generation III+ reactors allow reducing the probability of a severe accident (SA) due to internal initial events to a level of 10−7/year. Exceeding the radioactive release criterion may thus be related mainly to the consequences of beyond-design external events. This places special demands both for the selection of SA scenarios to consider and the methods for modeling the accident progression and consequences. The paper presents a method for selecting the representative SAs in the frame of PSA of new VVER NPP projects and a practical example of radiological analysis for two bounding accidents at an arbitrary NPP using an advanced integrated computer code system.
