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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.
Richard E. Faw
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 29 | Number 2 | August 1967 | Pages 210-217
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18529
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energy spectra have been computed for protons, alpha particles, and their secondary electrons slowing down in water irradiated by 14.6-MeV neutrons. Spectra for protons and alpha particles were based on continuous slowing down theory. Anisotropy of the proton-recoil reaction and elastic nuclear collisions of charged particles were found to have negligible influence on energy spectra and the energy-loss distribution. Partitioning of the neutron first-collision dose rate among the three particles was found to be very sensitive to the cutoff energy for production of secondary electrons. An analysis based on treatment of a collisional energy loss of less than 200 eV as localized energy dissipation along a particle track showed that localized electronic energy loss is distributed among protons, alpha particles, and their secondary electrons in the respective fractions 0.530, 0.112, and 0.358.
