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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.
Hyun-Sik Park, Hwang Bae, Sung-Uk Ryu, Byong-Guk Jeon, Jin-Hwa Yang, Sung-Jae Yi, Young-Jong Chung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 1617-1635
Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2217370
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal-hydraulic research supporting the development of an integral type of reactor named System-integrated Modular Advanced ReacTor (SMART) is discussed. First, the SMART development program is introduced. The Standard Design Approval (SDA) for SMART was certificated in 2012 based on extensive technical validation activities during 2009 to 2012, and a set of passive safety systems (PSSs) was designed and validated for SMART during 2013 to 2015 after the Fukushima Daiichi accident. During 2016 to 2018, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Korea conducted a 3-year project of Pre-Project Engineering (PPE), and now, the Standard Design Approval (SDA) for SMART100 is being processed from 2019. Second, the SMART validation test program and related test facilities are introduced. A set of integral effect tests (IETs) was performed using VISTA-ITL, and several separate effect tests (SETs) using the facilities of SWAT, SCOP, and FTHEL were performed for SMART SDA. Counterpart tests for SMART SDA were performed with the newly constructed SMART-ITL facility, and various validation tests for SMART PSSs were also performed. In addition, dozens of validation tests for SMART PPE were performed to produce IET data for design-basis-accident scenarios and PSSs. Additional SETs for SMART PPE and SMART100 SDA were performed using the facilities of SISTA-1, SISTA-2, and FINCLS. Third, the major test results are discussed for phenomena expected to occur in an integral type of reactor such as the SMART design. They include core cooling behaviors in the reactor coolant system and safety injection behaviors in the passive safety injection system and counterpart test results of a small-break loss-of-coolant accident between VISTA-ITL and SMART-ITL. Fourth, the major analysis results for SMART are discussed. Several sets of code analysis were performed for selected IET cases with the MARS-KS and TASS/SMR-S codes to validate their models and the codes themselves. They include simulation of a SMART safety injection system line break test with the MARS-KS code, validation of the TASS/SMR-S code for natural circulation tests, and validation of the MARS-KS and TASS/SMR-S codes based on a pressurizer safety valve line break test.
