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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.
Belal Almomani, Ahmad Ababneh, Muhammad Zubair
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 214-227
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2133507
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
After the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident, regulatory bodies were concerned about the safety measures in design and operation corresponding to the operator’s decisions and procedures for handling such off-normal transients. Several recommendations were proposed to analyze transients and accidents, improve and revise emergency operating procedures (EOPs), and conduct functional training. In this work, procedural paths were systematically studied to identify the problems in the diagnosis associated with a pilot-operated relief valve (PORV)–break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) as well as to suggest new indications for improving the EOPs. Operational parameters during PORV-break LOCA and pipeline-break small-break LOCA were analyzed using a generic pressurized water reactor simulator to compare and justify the symptoms between these two events. It was found that suggesting further indications mainly in the reactor cooling system and containment symptoms may improve the diagnosis of a PORV-break LOCA from the pipeline-break small-break LOCA. This paper presents a practical approach to evaluating diagnostic procedures to better understand operator recovery actions corresponding to reactor system response in dealing with a PORV-break LOCA.
