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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.
Qiang Huang, Jin Jiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 711-725
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1794436
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the most important considerations in the design of electronic systems for post-accident monitoring in a nuclear power plant is how to deal with the complex and uncertain radiation environments. Without using special design methodologies and adequate protection, nonradiation-hardened commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) electronic components can easily be damaged. In this paper, a new design methodology is proposed so that COTS components can be used in building post-accident monitoring systems (PAMSs). To validate the effectiveness of the methodology, a prototype wireless post-accident monitoring system has been designed, implemented, and evaluated in a 60Co gamma radiation environment. It has been concluded that even at a dose rate of 20 krad (Si)/h, the prototype system operates satisfactorily even after being irradiated for 21 h. The system also operates satisfactorily at a low dose rate of 200 rad (Si)/h. It can be concluded that, even with COTS components, the proposed design can effectively extend the lifespan of post-accident monitoring systems in different radiation environments. Based on the experimental results, it can be said with confidence that the developed radiation-tolerant wireless monitoring system can operate for at least 8 h under the highest observed dose rate (530 Sv/h) encountered during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and would have been able to provide crucial information to first responders following the accident.