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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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. J. Steyn, D. G. Andrews
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 2 | February 1967 | Pages 318-327
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18271
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Differential angular and energy distributions of backscattered gamma rays have been measured for photons normally incident on essentially semi-infinite scattering media of various atomic numbers. The measurements have been made by permitting a highly collimated 3- × 3-in. sodium-iodide (thallium-activated) scintillation crystal to view a sample area at the center of a scattering slab region irradiated by a broad beam of gamma radiation. The spectra have been recorded on a 400-channel pulse-height analyzer and reduced to detector incident flux by means of an IBM-7094 digital computer. The results have then been expressed graphically in terms of albedos and fitted to simple empirical expressions. In the case of high-atomic-number scatterers, K x-ray fluorescence has been separately evaluated.
