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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.
A. Klix, P. Batistoni, U. Fischer, H. Freiesleben, D. Leichtle, K. Seidel, S. Unholzer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 776-780
Technical Paper | Nuclear Analysis and Experiments | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1584
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mock-up of the European Helium-Cooled Pebble Bed TBM was irradiated with DT neutrons in pulsed and continuous mode at the Fusion Neutronics Laboratory of the University of Technology Dresden. The aim was to measure fast neutron and gamma-ray flux spectra as well as time-of-arrival spectra of the slow neutron flux. The results of the experiments were analysed by the Monte Carlo code MCNP and nuclear data from the European Fusion File (EFF-3),and the Fusion Evaluated Nuclear Data Library (FENDL-2.0/2.1). It was found that the calculation of the fast neutron flux above 3 MeV tends to overestimate while the gamma-ray flux and slow neutron flux in two measurement positions in the mock-up was underestimated. The mock-up was also irradiated at FNG/ENEA Frascati to measure tritium breeding rates by means of small Li2CO3 pellet detectors inserted into the breeding layers. The breeding experiment was analysed at FZ Karlsruhe with emphasis on determining sensitivities of the TPR to relevant cross section uncertainties of all materials in the mock-up. It was found that the TPR calculation shows a tendency to underestimate. From the sensitivity analysis it was found that the total TPR is most sensitive to the elastic scattering in Be and the 7Li(n,T) reaction.
