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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.
B. B. Cipiti, G. L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1245-1249
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A858
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The D-3He fusion reaction has been used to produce medical radioisotopes using the University of Wisconsin Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) Fusion Device. The high-energy 14.7 MeV proton generated from the reaction can activate materials for isotope production. The traditional IEC setup has been altered to generate medical isotopes using beam-target D-3He fusion. Beam target D-3He reactions in a thin-walled, water-cooled, stainless steel tube were used to create 13N, an isotope used in Positron Emission Tomography. At a maximum ion energy of 85 keV, 1.0 nCi of 13N was created as a proof of principle experiment. A scaled-up version of this concept may provide for a smaller, less expensive radioisotope generator for future commercial needs.
