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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.
Warren Fenton Stubbins, David M. Barton, and Frank D. Lonadier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 25 | Number 4 | August 1966 | Pages 377-382
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18557
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The production cross sections where α = σc/σf for 238Pu and 239Pu, have been compared in the fast neutron flux at the center of a bare spherical critical assembly of 239Pu. These quantities averaged by the fast-neutron spectrum indicate nearly the same properties for the even-even 238Pu nucleus as for the odd-even 239Pu nucleus. The ratio measured in a neutron flux peaked at 0.25 MeV with an average neutron energy = 1.67 MeV is (238Pu)/(239Pu) = 1.01 ± 0.06, and (238Pu) = 3.76 ± 0.23 b. The results of this study indicate that 238Pu metal probably has a critical mass of the same order of magnitude as 239Pu metal.
