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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.
H. Kakiuchi et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1256-1259
Environmental and Organically Bound Tritium | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12658
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We developed an analytical method for organically bound 3H (OBT) in biological environmental samples by using noble gas mass spectrometry of 3He produced from 3H. Three environmental samples with background level OBT concentrations were analyzed, and the results agreed well with those by the conventional liquid scintillation counting of electrolyzed combustion water of the samples. This showed that the method is practical and effective.We also developed an analytical method for non-exchangeable OBT as a combination of pre-treatment of dried samples with free water 3H and our newly developed analytical method for OBT. The repeated analysis of a grass sample with moderate 3H concentration had smaller variance of results for non-exchangeable OBT than for OBT. The sum of non-exchangeable and exchangeable OBT agreed well with OBT measured in the samples. The developed method was successfully applied to terrestrial and marine environmental samples with background 3H levels.
