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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.
Thomas S. Bustard, Joseph Silverman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 28 | Number 1 | April 1967 | Pages 55-61
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18667
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis is performed which indicates that beta particle backscattering measurements are highly sensitive to source-scatterer separation distances. It is shown that the primary betas emitted by the source strike the scatterer according to a Cauchy statistical distribution. Then, making the assumption that the primary betas are adsorbed on the scatterer and isotropically reemitted, an effective counting geometry can be obtained. A comparison of this effective geometry with the source geometry will then give an indication of the expected backscatter signal sensitivity. It is shown that a 50-mil separation distance can result in a backscatter measurement error of 25%. Zumwalt's empirical relationship for saturation backscattering is used to analytically predict the expected normalized (source signal equal to one) signal as a function of source-scatterer separation distance and scatterer atomic number. Finally, aluminum, nickel, niobium, palladium, and tantalum scatterers are employed using thallium-204 (204Tl) and phosphorus-32 (32P) beta sources in conjunction with a thin-window halogen-quenched G-M tube to compare experimental and analytical results. This experiment shows that Zumwalt's equation provides an excellent fit to the experimental results in all instances except when employing the low atomic number scatterer, aluminum.
