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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.
Tohru Haga
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 38 | Number 2 | November 1969 | Pages 104-113
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19514
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron density and importance distributions, βeff/Λ and moderator temperature coefficients have been experimentally studied in connection with a central water gap of a light-water reactor having a water to UO2 volume ratio of 1.5. Thermal importance functions are determined from the reactivity weighting function, while the fast importance functions are measured by a 252Cf source introduction method. Values of βeff/Λ measured by pulsed-neutron experiments decrease from 202 sec−1 in the uniform core to 185 sec−1- for the core with a water gap of 6.7 cm effective radius. It is also shown that the water gap influences the moderator temperature coefficient to a considerable extent.
