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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.
Thomas R. Wellock
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1394-1409
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1826273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper examines the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) pursuit of social science research that could inform the oversight of nuclear power plant management. Perhaps no nuclear regulator has been as supportive of research on the intersection of organizational factors and reactor safety or as cautious in applying those findings to its regulations.
This dissonance was rooted in the NRC’s long-held conviction that it should regulate power plants not people, which conflicted with its regulatory experience after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident (TMI). Intrusive oversight of a licensee’s “business,” it was believed, would destroy its sense of ownership for safety. TMI challenged that understanding of the NRC’s role, and a series of mishaps at other plants compelled the agency to cross the line between regulation and management. The NRC’s relationship with industry became highly adversarial, and the agency turned to social scientists to help establish an objective basis to judge a licensee’s organizational culture. Behavioral experts joined plant oversight review teams and received generous funding to quantify the contribution of organizational factors to accident risk. Scores of scholars at national laboratories and a dozen universities contributed, but the NRC abandoned the research in the mid-1990s in the face of inconclusive research and industry resistance.
In need of a less controversial oversight program, the NRC abandoned direct assessment of plant management for a more quantitative approach that relied on plant performance indicators. When the 2002 Davis-Besse vessel head erosion event came perilously close to a significant loss-of-coolant accident, it raised questions about the appropriate role for the NRC in assessing a licensee’s safety culture. The NRC revised its oversight program to incorporate qualitative insights from its earlier research while still acknowledging the line between regulation and management. The NRC learned that while there were substantial cultural and technical obstacles to integrating safety culture insights with established management and regulatory practices, it was necessary to overcome them. The agency found stability in its contentious oversight program only when it made appropriate room for safety culture expertise.