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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
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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. Matsuura et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 268-272
Fusion-Fission Hybrids and Transmutation | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13431
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The performance of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor as a tritium production device was examined. A gas turbine high-temperature reactor of 300 MWe nominal capacity (GTHTR300) was assumed as the calculation target of a typical gas-cooled reactor, and using the continuous-energy Monte Carlo transport code MVP-BURN, burn-up simulations for the entire-core region of GTHTR300 were carried out considering its unique double heterogeneity structure. It was shown that gas-cooled reactors with thermal output power of 3 GW in all can produce 6~10 kg of tritium in a year.
