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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.
W. A. Coleman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 32 | Number 1 | April 1968 | Pages 76-81
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-1
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first section of this paper is a mathematical construction of a certain Monte Carlo procedure for sampling from the distribution The construction begins by defining a particular random variable λ. The distribution function of λ is developed and found to be identical to F(X). The definition of λ describes the sampling procedure. Depending on the behavior of Σ(x), it may be more efficient to sample from F(X) by obtaining realizations of λ than by the more conventional procedure described in the paper. Section II is a discussion of applications of the technique to problems in radiation transport where F(X) is frequently encountered as the distribution function for nuclear collisions. The first application is in charged particle transport where Σ(x) is essentially a continuous function of x. An application in complex geometries where Σ(x) is a step function, and changes values numerous times over a mean path, is also cited. Finally, it is pointed out that the technique has been used to improve the efficiency of estimating certain quantities, such as the number of absorptions in a material.
