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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.
L. Wu, G. H. Miley, H. Momota, P. J. Shrestha
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1096-1100
Technical Paper | Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1643
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Homeland security has an urgent need for an advanced detecting system to accurately and quickly search for nuclear and explosive materials in a wide variety of situations. An integrated broad area coverage neutron/x-ray interrogation unit is proposed here to meet such needs. This system will use a unique cylindrical Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) device. This compact pulsed neutron/x-ray line source can produce ~2 × 1010 n/s 14.1-MeV D-T neutrons, ~108 n/s 2.45-MeV D-D neutrons and 80 kV x-rays.Unlike prior neutron activation systems, this unit can provide a long line-like emission source to obtain broad coverage, providing very fast scan time for even large objects. The use of combined multi-energy neutron and x-ray sources, along with a 3-D detector array and fuzzy logic analysis system, are expected to provide high elemental identification accuracy, greatly decreasing false signals so commonly encountered in prior systems. Analysis techniques will employ both thermal neutron analysis (TNA)and pulsed fast neutron analysis (PFNA), accompanied by broad area x-ray imaging techniques.
