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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.
Xianping Zhong, Jiyang Yu, Xiaolong Zhang, Muhammad Saeed, Yi Li, Zhihui Chen, Bin Tang, Yan Sun, Tao Huang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 228-246
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1763097
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pressurizer of a pressurized water reactor (PWR), as a spray-heating degasser, has been widely used to remove dissolved gas in the primary coolant of PWRs. In the real degassing process, the boundary conditions of the pressurizer may change, causing fluctuations in the degassing state and affecting the efficiency of degassing. However, open-published studies have focused mainly on the steady-state degassing characteristics of the pressurizer. This paper studies the dynamic characteristics of a spray-heating degasser as applied to the pressurizer of a PWR. First, a lumped parameter dynamic degassing model for the spray-heating degasser is proposed based on basic gas dissolution and transport theory. Second, this model is extended, and a dynamic degassing model for the pressurizer is obtained. Third, two sets of numerical hydrogen degassing tests are carried out using the pressurizer dynamic degassing model. These two sets of numerical tests take the Shippingport pressurizer as the research object and integrate the structure and operating parameters of the Shippingport pressurizer with the system parameters of a Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory hydrogen degassing test as the numerical test condition.
The spray-heating degasser degassing model is universal and applicable to this pressurizer as well as other devices with similar structures. The first set of numerical tests carried out reveals the physical mechanism of degassing with the spray-heating degasser. The pressurizer degassing model can be used for transient degassing analysis, and it also provides a basis for the subsequent design of the control system of pressurizer degassing.