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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.
H. K. Clark
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 24 | Number 2 | February 1966 | Pages 133-141
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18298
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The influence of the distribution of 235U, 239Pu, and 233U in water on the minimum critical mass, the minimum critical concentration per unit length of cylinder, and the minimum critical mass per unit area of slab surface is calculated. Two energy groups are employed in the calculations with parameters normalized to force agreement between calculations and experiments performed with water-reflected spheres containing uniform aqueous solutions having a wide range of concentrations. Calculations made with these parameters for a water-reflected cylinder, in which the optimum distribution for minimum mass was approximated within five coaxial regions, agree well with experimental results. Minimum critical masses, concentrations per unit length of cylinder, and masses per unit area calculated for 235U, 239Pu, and 233U are, respectively, 768 g, 16.9 g/cm, 0.417 g/ cm2; 492 g, 10.6 g/cm, 0.266 g/cm2; and 571 g, 13.5 g/cm, 0.362 g/cm2.
