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Latest News
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.
Hiroko Ohuchi, Yasuhiro Kondo, Yamato Asakura, Takao Kawano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 944-947
Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12571
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An imaging plate (IP) was applied to measure tritium in high 60Co gamma-ray radiation fields. The IP made of europium-doped BaFBr(I), a photostimulated luminescence (PSL) material, is a two-dimensional radiation sensor. The PSL response of the IP has a peak at 20-50 keV and steeply decreases towards higher energy, falling by one hundredth at around 1 MeV. By utilizing a large difference in the PSL response to photon energy between 60Co (1.173 and 1.333 MeV) and tritium (maximum energy of 18.6 keV), the bremsstrahlung X-ray induced by tritium beta ray was detected in mixed radiation fields with tritium and 60Co, varying 60Co dose rate in the range 0.0013 to 9.22 Gy/min. It was found that the effect of 60Co irradiation to PSL value, obtained by irradiated with tritium of 12.5 MBq, was negligible by dose rate of 4.38 Gy/min and there was only 7.0% difference of PSL value, obtained by irradiated with tritium of 100 MBq, between dose rate of 0.0013 and 9.22 Gy/min. The IP tritium measurement method can be a promising candidate to measure tritium in high gamma-ray radiation fields.
