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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.
A. L. Kaplan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 2 | February 1967 | Pages 388-393
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18277
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Attenuation by a floor barrier of fallout gamma radiation scattered into a basement has been studied experimentally with cylindrical steel structures. These structures were 2-ft high, 2-ft in diameter, with a 4-ft-deep basement. Wall thicknesses varied between 5 and 60 psf, with floor thicknesses of 0, 10, 20, and 40 psf. Detectors in the basement were located between 0.25 and 3 ft below ground. Cobalt-60 point sources were used to simulate the fallout field. Basement reduction factors predicted by structure shielding theory were lower than the experimental results by a factor of between 1.5 and 8. This discrepancy was attributed to the theoretical floor-barrier reduction factor. A new theoretical floor-barrier reduction factor, which is a function of both the floor thickness and the solid-angle fraction subtended at the detector by the floor, was constructed within the formalism of the existing structure shielding theory. This new function agreed quite well with both experimental results and Monte Carlo calculations, over the entire range of wall and floor thicknesses used in the experiment.
