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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.
Toshiyuki Umata, Toshiyuki Norimura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1193-1196
Biology | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12629
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A large amount of tritium is required as the fuel source for the nuclear fusion reaction. As a result, during the routine operation or in case of accidents, one of the major issues is the assessment of the biological effects of tritium released from nuclear fusion power plants. In this study, the mutagenic effects of tritiated water (HTO) were compared to those of 137Cs irradiation on spleen T lymphocytes of wild (p53+/+) mice and p53-deficient (p53-/-) mice. In both mice, TCR variant fractions induced by HTO was higher than those by simulation-irradiation of 137Cs rays. When compared on the basis of the induced TCR variant fractions in p53-/- mice at 3 Gy, tritium rays appear to be 1.7 times more mutagenic than rays. On the other hand, in p53+/+ mice, HTO injection increased induced TCR variant fractions significantly, whereas simulation-irradiation did not increase those at all. In order to elucidate the reason responsible for this difference in p53+/+ mice, we investigated the apoptotic ability of spleen T lymphocytes. As a result, the apoptotic ability of spleen T lymphocytes from p53+/+ mice exposed to HTO was reduced significantly compared to that from p53+/+ mice not exposed.
