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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.
G. L. Beausoleil, C. Petrie, W. Williams, A. Jokisaari, L. Capriotti, S. Novascone, C. Adkins, M. Kerr
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 10 | October 2021 | Pages 1491-1510
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1826272
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the increasing interest in sodium fast reactor technology, as seen by applications to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the OKLO Aurora plant, fuel testing for the TerraPower Traveling Wave Reactor, and the impending construction and startup of the versatile test reactor (VTR), a modernized, accelerated approach to fuel qualification is needed. To guide this effort, a Phenomena Identification Ranking Table–styled analysis was performed for a U-Pu-Zr sodium-free annular fuel system. This analysis evaluated a series of fuel design properties and parameters against their contributions to key fuel performance phenomena. The resulting priority parameters were then reviewed against existing modeling and experimental capabilities to support investigation of the highest-priority parameters. A pathway for qualification was then established using high-throughput, high-volume experiments from MiniFuel and FAST in parallel with advanced physics-based model development. This effort outlines how the first stages of qualification can be reduced from the typical 20+-year development cycle to 5 to 7 years by deploying accelerated irradiation testing platforms. As with any accelerated test, these methods are prototypic in some aspects and less so in others; however, by coupling with advanced fuel performance modeling and simulation capabilities, the larger space of irradiation parameters and material response provided offers advantages for the validation of physics-based models supporting the deployment of novel fuel designs. As a test case, this paper utilizes a proposed Mark II fuel system for the upcoming VTR. Thus, an accelerated qualification method can be tested for the development of MARK II driver fuel so that by the time of VTR startup, lead test assemblies for a Mark II fuel can be initiated.