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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.
Vladimir M. Novikov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 417-422
Education, Economics, and Sustainability | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13456
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Last 50 yrs the conventional Nuclear Power (NP) witnessed several periods of optimistic expectation for NP growth. Nevertheless, no one scenario was completely realized, and periods of high expectation followed by NP stagnation. Apparently, this proves that not only economic but also social and geopolitical environment is at least not fully favorable to the conventional NP. Being nuclear, an Emerging Nuclear System (ENS) inherits this unfavorable environment. The ENS should therefore cope with the sigma of nuclear past and a potential dark side of nuclear future. The paper reviews several international studies of the global nuclear legacy performed last decade and the implication of the legacy on generic perspective of NP. Further, the paper identifies and discusses unresolved problems of nuclear fuel cycle, which can feed threat of proliferation and emerging face of nuclear terrorism. Finally, the paper formulates some recommendations that would help proponents of emerging nuclear energy systems to govern identified problems and thus helps to embed NP in sustainable development.
