From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons

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.

How did you end up working in nuclear power?

I was a welder by trade, working in large-scale manufacturing on the lines as an assembly worker shortly after high school. Both of my parents were manufacturers, working for United Auto Workers. Our household grew up on American manufacturing.

When I was 20, in the early '80s, the economy and the manufacturing base in the northern part of Illinois where we worked was very rough, and both of my parents lost their jobs. It was a little bit of a wakeup call. Long story short, I decided to join the military, got certified as an electronics technician while in the Air Force, and got a job at Underwriters Laboratories when I came out.

Shortly after I left the military, Zion nuclear power plant just north of Chicago was hiring like crazy. So I got my start in nuclear when I answered an ad in the paper.

What did you do at Zion?

I went through their standard testing, and the recruiter came back to me and said, "I&C [instrumentation and control] would be a fantastic spot for you, but would you like to be an operator?"

I had to ask her what an operator did, and then I asked, "What does it pay?" When she said it paid about two-and-a-half times what the I&C technician job would pay, I said she could sign me up for that. At Zion I was a union operator for about nine years. I fell in love with the industry. I was going to retire from Zion, which was going to operate forever. And as all things happen, Zion did not go on forever.

Where did you go from there?

I got the opportunity with some others from Zion to work at Point Beach in Kewaunee, Wis., which was just up the lake from us. At Point Beach I got invited to roles for which I had no formal training but because I had a really strong plant operations background. If you have a good understanding of how the plant works, specifically around the mechanics of it-outages, maintenance, safety-it gives you a foundation to be trained and mentored in many other places.

For the nine or so years I was at Point Beach, I served as a corrective action specialist, a human performance coordinator, and a workweek manager, which opened opportunities to see how outage management works in coordination with on-line work management. Because of my electrical background, I was invited to help the electrical maintenance department build their schedules. That led to becoming an electrical maintenance scheduler. From there I got to work with the craft, and that led to being electrical supervisor. I got involved in working with the external contractors. At one point I was the dive coordinator, though I never dove a day in my life!

From Point Beach, you relocated to Minnesota to work for Xcel Energy. Tell me about that move.

When Xcel Energy decided to move operation of its Monticello and Prairie Island plants from the Nuclear Management Company-which had also operated Point Beach-to a dedicated nuclear corporate organization, I was one of the folks who was invited over from Point Beach to help stand up that organization. I was involved in five different disciplines as the corporate functional area manager, or CFAM: outages, on-line scheduling, maintenance, safety, and human performance. My role was to help get the organization working to a common standard. There were quite a few things that I had never done before that ultimately proved to be just another great experience for training and growth.

Can you give a specific example of something related to outage management that was difficult at the time but turned out to be a learning experience?

We needed to work toward a common set of standards and a common approach to outage management. Xcel has a unique small fleet in that Prairie Island has two pressurized water reactors and Monticello has a single-unit boiling water reactor, and as at all fleets-like it or not-the organizations that work at a site develop their own culture.

We had industry best practices defined by Institute of Nuclear Power Operations; we had the requirements of 10 CFR Part 50 in many different appendices. But trying to establish a single way of doing business in many cases doesn't fit that well.

It was as if I'd come in and said, "I've got this shirt, it's supposed to fit everybody. You need to go put it on. Then you need to do this, and you need to do that." It didn't take me long to find out that was not the way to approach things.

Probably 95 percent of every successful outcome comes down to how much the people involved trust each other. I was the new guy, and I was coming in to implement changes. There was a lot of learning and discussion, but ultimately I was supported by my leadership team, who helped me figure out how we could align aspects of outage management in a way that afforded the foundation of a standardized model. From there we could custom fit to each site.

Over time, as outages are executed, post-outage critiques and data provide opportunities to drive improvements in performance, whether that's safety performance, financial performance, schedule performance, or significant issue performance. At the end of the day, the real fruit is understanding what the organization needs to be successful and then focusing on that.

Did your outage management experience extend beyond the site boundaries at Point Beach, Monticello, and Prairie Island?

When I was with Xcel and we were part of the Utilities Service Alliance (USA), I was invited, along with about 10 or 12 other senior outage managers, to work with INPO and the Electric Power Research Institute on an outage excellence team to help write standards for outages. We were trying to do things innovatively, trying to figure out how the organizations could help outage improvement across the sites that were part of USA at that time.

Following that work, I was invited along with two other outage CFAMs who were part of USA to codevelop an outage manager training program, and I was part of a small team that helped deliver that training program to different classes of outage managers, starting with a group from Westinghouse.

That experience helped me understand the importance of knowledge transfer. If we have a mass exodus of senior outage managers and new folks aren't hired soon enough, there could be a significant challenge for outage performance. Based on some of the conversations that we have been having, this challenge still exists today.

After your time at Xcel Energy, you took a role at a nuclear supplier working on equipment manufacturing Westinghouse's AP1000s. What was your role?

I was at Xcel Energy for three years, and then I was hired in as the general manager of PaR Nuclear-based here in Minnesota-from 2011 to 2014. PaR, as well as the NuCrane joint venture, which was also my responsibility, were part of Westinghouse's Manufacturing Operations Division and were producing major cranes and other components, including refueling equipment, for Westinghouse's AP1000s.

Westinghouse had challenges in getting components to the AP1000 builds at Summer and Vogtle. What did you see in your role in the supply chain?

At the time I walked in, there were some inconsistencies in the designs that had flowed down to our supplier base but that hadn't been realized yet. That was one of the drivers for the challenges we had getting things from the drawing board to manufacturing and then into a box and shipped.

Being in manufacturing early on in my career, we always understood that a design will come in from engineering. We're going to cut metal, attach it, and put it through and test it, knowing that at some point quality control or quality assurance is going to find things that don't meet muster. Great-we'll go back, adjust the designs as necessary, get it back to fabrication. It was all toward the same goal: keep running things through fabrication to the point that you reach a state where the degree of deviation or design escape is acceptable.

One example was around coatings. The specifications for the paint depth on the large-scale girders for the polar crane that we passed down to the supplier simply could not be met with where they were and what they were doing. We invited our suppliers in with our design team and our manufacturing team and our leadership team-person to person, face to face-to sit and listen. To remedy the problem, we took some of our own QC folks and put them on the shop floor so that as those processes began, the supplier could work with the QC folks to understand what needed to be done, which sometimes required input from the engineering organization.

Again, it comes back to what we were talking about with standardizing outages at the fleet. Both communities-engineering and manufacturing-have restrictions on how to get work done and they have a way of getting work done.

When you left your role supporting Westinghouse at PaR Nuclear, it was to start your own company. What was your motivation?

The success of getting things through production was really the spark for what I believed could be something our industry and supply base would benefit from: an organization that understood the utilities, understood what it takes to do maintenance, and with a good understanding of NQA-1. An organization that can be a bridge representing suppliers back to the industry. I did an informal market analysis, and I founded American Mergers & Manufacturing International (AMMI) in 2014. That's the company now doing business as Waymaker Resources Group. AMMI's name is echoed in AMMI Risk Solutions, a risk management software company that I cofounded with Atkins Global to deploy the risk analysis software that we developed together. While I have an ownership stake in AMMI Risk Solutions, since 2022 I've been fully focused on Waymaker.

Getting a business degree later in my career filled in the gaps of understanding that nuclear power plants fundamentally are just a business. It doesn't matter if you are a tier-1 supplier like a GE, Siemens, or Westinghouse, or whether you're a nuclear power plant operator, either in a large fleet or a single operating plant. At the end of the day, the fundamentals of whether or not the plant stays open come down to covering the cost of operation, so there's ample retained earnings for reinvestment into the facility to make it safer and stronger, while at the same time balancing all the stakeholders-internal and external.

Seeing what Zion experienced when that plant closed continues to be a driver for me and for the people within our organization that we're going to do everything that we can every single day to make sure that these nuclear power plants don't shut down.

Speaking of one plant that won't stay shut down, what is Waymaker's role in the Palisades restart project?

Professional staffing was and continues to be our primary support at Palisades. Today I think we've got a little over 110 people at the site across many divisions. We have folks within maintenance planning, emergency planning, and licensing, for example.

We met with the leadership team at Holtec in late 2023, and they initially were looking for experienced project managers who could work within the schedule they had developed. We were one of maybe four or five different firms invited in to help bring senior experience from the nuclear industry as they were trying to get their restart project off the ground.

Waymaker does large-scale project management within what we call an integrated project delivery model, meaning we act as a liaison between our clients and the resources that we bring to a project-whether they're people or whether they're any one of the supplier partners that we have today-understanding what the client is looking for and then acting as an agent to bring those resources to that project.

Holtec shared with us that they were not looking just for another contractor or supplier. They were looking for someone to-in their terms-sit on the same side of the table with them, to understand what they're dealing with, and not just provide people, but to every so often give them some insight that they might consider as they go forward. It's been a dynamic and fruitful relationship.

Has Holtec asked for other restart support, beyond professional staffing?

Yes. Waymaker has expanded into specialty crane manufacturing, crane inspection services-anything with material handling cranes and hoists. We've stood up a crane manufacturing facility here in Minnesota, and we have support nationally with a handful of crane manufacturers and crane service centers across the country. We will be providing two specialty cranes at Palisades.

Just recently, we received a contract from Holtec for preliminary data and systems analysis to identify possible longer-term opportunities to improve Palisades' preventive maintenance and outage cycle schedule. Waymaker did similar work for Barakah Units 1-4 in the UAE in 2022 and 2023.

What do the current growth prospects for nuclear energy mean to you and Waymaker?

More than anything else, it's affirmed our belief and understanding of the future energy demands for the country. We've always known that nuclear is really the only consistent baseload energy source that can "weather the weather." It's encouraging that the country and our administration reflects a common understanding that nuclear and thermal energy is a sustainable platform to produce energy.

For our small company, it allows us to act on our medium- and long-term strategic planning in a way that gives us a higher degree of confidence in our own return on investment.

Once the first new builds start, they will need people with experience to be fully effective and efficient. At the same time, there could be growing scarcity of experienced people that an established nuclear power facility needs to run outages.

Do you see challenges ahead for the nuclear power industry?

I don't think it's isolated to nuclear, but there remains a severe scarcity of technical and professional resources and experience to do the fundamental planning and preps for any large project-maintenance planners, quality assurance, professional project management. That scarcity of people and suppliers is going to continue to be amplified with other things that are happening in industry around us.

On the other hand, smart, reliability-centered maintenance has essentially reduced the workload that needs to be done with a certain frequency, which gives instant relief to the number of resources that are needed.

All the standardized lessons learned from EPRI, INPO, and the like are still critically important, because they are going to help us understand the percentage of deviation around resource maintenance load that's necessary to maintain health and safety. At the same time, we'll be growing a workforce and supply base so that when they all converge, it creates a healthy environment for all nuclear power plants to be successful.