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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.
J. R. Fong, S. A. Eddinger, H. Huang, K. A. Moreno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 367-372
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST55-367
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An instrumentation of X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) was developed to measure the areal density of any element with an atomic number Z > 17. In contrast to X-ray fluorescence, which is affected by spatial dopant nonuniformity, an element can be accurately measured by XAS regardless of its own distribution or the presence of other elements in a sample. Furthermore, no reference standard is needed to achieve ±3% 1 accuracy. This method has been used to measure the average contents of specific elements in a variety of inertial confinement fusion and high energy density targets. It validates the average dopant concentration measured by contact radiography and differential radiography.