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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.
Mariia Iakovleva, Jeremy Rayner, Ken Coates
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1351-1365
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1855947
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are currently framed as a clean energy innovation with a vital role to play in decarbonizing power production. We review two popular sustainability transitions frameworks—strategic niche management and technological innovation systems— for case studies of analogous clean technology innovations. We focus on those that include policy-relevant recommendations that could be applied to the challenges posed by successfully scaling up SMRs from prototypes to commercial production. Particular attention is paid to how each approach understands the linkages between technology and the broader social and economic context. Innovative features of this paper include a systematic review of the lessons from renewable energy case studies for engagement with policy practitioners; reflections on the challenges of applying Euro-centric approaches in the sustainability transitions literature to non-European environments, including remote, northern, and indigenous communities; and some preliminary lessons for policy development that reflect the current situation with SMRs and support evidence-informed decision making in communities currently considering SMRs as part of a future clean energy mix.