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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.
Yuelei Wu, Huasi Hu, Tiankui Zhang, Zhenghong Li, Yuanping Zhan, Zhenyu Jiang, Jun Chu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 3 | April 2010 | Pages 292-297
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9472
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The relationship and differences between pinhole imaging and penumbral imaging are explained and discussed in detail. A Monte Carlo (MC) model for a practical fusion neutron penumbral imaging system, which is expected to be used as one of the diagnostics of the nuclear facilities in China, was established. The source consists of many assumed discrete elements whose sizes equal the minimum resolution of the imaging system and that are identical to the point source in general concept. The point spread functions (PSFs) of two assumed discrete elements, located in the center and at the edge of a 200-m field of view (FOV) in the neutron source face, were obtained for two cases, respectively: imaging in geometrical near-optics and the more real case of an MC numerical experiment. A series of PSFs of points in the diameter of FOV were obtained, and the PSF spatial shift invariance tolerances were tested within [approximately]20 m accuracy. Using mathematical analysis convolution and MC numerical experiments, "penumbral images" of a neutron source, which consists of just four discrete elements in 20-m space, were obtained. Employing the same program, the two penumbral images were reconstructed, and the obtained original source images were basically the same. This allows the nature of encoding and decoding by the neutron penumbral imaging aperture prototype, which was designed by our work group, to be visualized and realized.