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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.
Dai Xinyu, Yang Ming, Wang Jipu, Li Wei, Xu Zhihui
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 730-744
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2155023
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Human error is still one of the main factors threatening the safe operation of nuclear power plants. In view of the deviation of operators’ actions from operating procedures and the impact of implementation of operating procedures on safety functions, this paper proposes the Operating Procedures Supervision System (OPSS). The OPSS monitors operators’ performance deviating from operating procedures, determines the operation state of a nuclear power plant according to realization of the three key safety functions of the plant (reactivity control, radioactivity containment, and residual heat removal), and evaluates the impact of the implementation of operating procedures on the safety state. Although the OPSS supports both off-line and online applications, this paper presents only an example of off-line evaluation to illustrate the method. On this basis, the paper proposes a risk matrix to comprehensively weigh operator action deviation and the impact of operator actions on plant safety functions, which can more finely perceive the changes of system safety status and of operator performance.
