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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.
V. Y. Korolevych, S. B. Kim
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1288-1291
Environmental and Organically Bound Tritium | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12666
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study is devoted to the collection and robust analysis of 2008-2009 field data pertaining to airborne tritium transfer in potato and tomato plants subject to continuous releases. The study is a part of implementation and validation of tritium transfer model ported to Canadian LAnd Surface Scheme (CLASS), which has been recently extended towards plant phenomenology in Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CTEM+CLASS v.2.7). The initial validation has been performed for ratios of organic to free-water tritium in plant tissues (OBT/HTO ratios) retrieved from the simple off-line tritium uptake and re-emission routine assessed against historical OBT/HTO ratio datasets. The observed underestimate of high OBT/HTO ratios in this simple model warrants deployment of CTEM+CLASS and makes it necessary to focus the next experimental validation effort at tritium re-emission phase. The concentration of HTO in the upper soil layer, in the different parts of vegetation and in the air has been assessed. The sampling was performed on weekly and hourly scales, in the latter case with emphasis on a night-time period. The process of uptake from atmosphere has been clarified using plants grown on the clean tarp-covered soil at Acid Rain Site of Chalk River Laboratories (CRL), which dumped the root uptake pathway. The processes of root uptake and re-emission from plant were clarified at the irrigated Perch Lake site of CRL. Auxiliary environmental drivers and site-specific data were collected according to format of inputs and parameterization of CTEM+CLASS.