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Latest News
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.
Paul P. H. Wilson, Todd R. Allen, Laila A. El-Guebaly
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 445-449
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A727
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the first time since the early 1990's, the U.S. Department of Energy has long term research and development programs in both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, the Generation IV program and the ARIES program, respectively. The Generation IV program has introduced a safety goal for future fission reactor systems that has long been reflected in the ARIES mission: no off-site emergency response to any design basis accident. This change, in concert with the overall departure from light water reactor technology, will drive a change in the regulatory framework for both Generation IV reactors and fusion power plants of the future. Further, both fission and fusion power plants will have to compete in similar future energy markets with uncertainties in energy prices and the development of alternative energy products. Enabling the success of nuclear energy, advanced materials will be a cornerstone to both programs, driven both by higher temperatures and heat fluxes and by a desire for longer lifetimes in high radiation environments. The synergies created by these increasingly parallel programs open the door for renewed collaborations that will increase the total effectiveness of research needed in both.
