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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.
Donald J. Dudziak
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 2 | February 1967 | Pages 328-337
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18272
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effective two-group gamma-ray spectra have been determined for thermal-neutron capture in sodium, nickel, type-304 stainless steel, and tantalum, as well as for 235 U prompt-fission gamma rays. A seven-group compilation of capture gamma rays was used as the basis for this study. Absorbed dose (uncollided and builtup) in several materials was calculated for varying thicknesses of several intervening shielding materials. The resulting function for each combination was reduced to two exponential functions over a range of 0 up to 560 g/cm2. Effective spectra were determined to be as follows: sodium, 6.09 MeV/capture at 5.5 MeV and 5.74 MeV/capture at 2.0 MeV; nickel, 8.33 MeV/capture at 8.0 MeV and 1.62 MeV/capture at 2.0 MeV; type-304 SS, 5.86 MeV/capture at 8.0 MeV and 1.95 MeV/capture at 2.0 MeV; tantalum, 3.76 MeV/capture at 4.0 MeV and 2.88 MeV/capture at 1.5 MeV; prompt fission, 2.31 MeV/fission at 4.0 MeV and4.92 MeV/fission at 1.25 MeV. These effective spectra reproduce, to within an average absolute deviation of less than 7.4%, the absorbed doses (uncollided and builtup) calculated by the detailed spectra, within the ranges of areal density considered.
