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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.
Michael P. Short (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Miaomiao Jin (Idaho National Laboratory), Ittinop Dumnernchanvanit (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Max Carlson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Sean Robertson (Transatomic Power Corporation), Gilberto Mota (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Alexandra R. Delmore (University of Wisconsin Madison), Akshay Dave (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Bren A. Philips (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Sidney Yip (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Benjamin S. Collins (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Andrew T. Nelson (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Dennis F. Hussey (Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)), Daniel M. Wells (Electric Power Research Institute), Jeff Deshon (Electric Power Research Institute), Naiqiang Zhang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Brian Kendrick (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Chris Stanek (Los Alamos National Laboratory), David Andersson (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Kenneth J. McClellan (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Brian D. Wirth (University of Tennessee Knoxville), Derek R. Gaston (Idaho National Laboratory), Cody J. Permann (Idaho National Laboratory), Richard C. Martineau (Idaho National Laboratory)
Proceedings | The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors Virtual Meeting | November 16-19, 2020 | Pages 461-466
