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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.
S. Tina Ghosh, Hossein Esmaili, Alfred Hathaway, Nathan Bixler, Dusty Brooks, Matthew Dennis, Douglas Osborn, Kyle Ross, Kenneth Wagner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 3 | March 2021 | Pages 441-451
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1875737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper provides an overview of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) project to develop a technical report summarizing the most important insights from its three State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses (SOARCA) project uncertainty analyses (UAs). The NRC, with Sandia National Laboratories, has completed three UAs as part of the SOARCA project, for three different operating reactor types in three different locations in the United States. The SOARCA UAs included an integrated evaluation of uncertainty in accident progression, radiological release, and off-site health consequence projections. These three UAs are currently documented in three detailed reports. The NRC is currently developing a technical overview report summarizing the important insights from the three SOARCA UAs. The purpose of the NRC summary is to provide a useful reference for regulatory applications that require the evaluation of off-site consequence risk from beyond-design-basis-event severe accidents. Examples include regulatory and cost-benefit analyses that rely on off-site consequence projections using the MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System (MACCS) code, in conjunction with MELCOR for source term characterization. This paper provides an overview and discusses the overall scope and methodology of the SOARCA UAs and the approach for the summary report currently under development.