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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. D. Spencer, T. G. Williamson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 3 | March 1967 | Pages 568-572
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17623
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The age of fission neutrons was measured to the indium resonance energy for light water and three metal-to-water volume ratios (1/4, 1/2, 2/3) in aluminum- water mixtures. A large plane highly enriched 235U fission plate provided the source of neutrons. Aluminum plates (0.127 × 122 × 122 cm) oriented parallel to the source plane were used for the metal. Indium foil activities were taken in planes parallel to the source and integrated over these planes to obtain the equivalent activities that would result from an infinite source. From these data, the ages for the four cases were: M/W = 0, (26.24 ± 0.33 cm2); M/W = 1/4, (32.28 ± 0.50 cm2); M/W = 1/2, (39.96 ± 0.50 cm2); M/W = 2/3, (44.88 ± 0.59 cm2). To investigate heterogeneous effects, the plates were lumped to simulate 0.635-cm-thick plates and the measurements repeated for the 2/3 metal-to-water ratio. The measured age was 44.50 ± 0.49 cm2, indicating no lumping effect in this measurement. The data for the pure water measurement were also analyzed by applying geometric corrections for the finite size of the source plate. This resulted in a measured age of 27.82 ± 0.66 cm2, which agrees with previous measurements utilizing this method of data analysis.
