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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.
Gang Zhang, Shibo Mei, Kaijie Xie, Zhen Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 10 | October 2021 | Pages 1564-1577
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1824965
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fatigue state of nuclear power operators is of vital importance to the safe operation of a nuclear power plant. With the development of the digital manipulation interface in recent years, the fatigue type and degree of operators have undergone changes. The interface of the nuclear power monitoring task is simulated in this experiment, and multiple fatigue detection modes are used to measure the fatigue state of operators. Results show that the subjective fatigue reporting method and PERCLOS P80 can reflect the change of fatigue state. The correlation between task performance and fatigue is not remarkable, and the sensitivity of the electrocardiographic heart rate variability indicator is poor. The accuracy also remains to be further verified.
