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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.
G. T. Chapman, W. R. Burrus
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 34 | Number 2 | November 1968 | Pages 169-180
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A19542
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurements of the pulse-height distribution of gamma rays observed as a function of position and angle in the water shield of the Bulk Shielding Reactor II, a water-moderated and water-cooled pool-type reactor with stainless steel clad fuel plates, have been transformed to gamma-ray energy flux spectra by a computer program which removed the effects of the spectrometer's nonunique pulse-height response and accounted for the energy variation of the spectrometer's efficiency. The results show that the photons above 5 MeV originate primarily from thermal-neutron capture in the components of the stainless steel. Gamma rays due to the 57Fe component were identified as those known to be at 5.91, 6.02, and 7.6 MeV. Others were due to 58Fe at 10.16 MeV, to 54Cr at 8.88 and 9.72 MeV, and to 59Ni at 8.53 and 8.99 MeV. Below 5 MeV the spectra consist of a strong contribution at 2.2 MeV from thermal-neutron capture in the hydrogen of the pool water, combined with a continuum presumably composed of prompt and delayed gamma rays following fission, lower energy components in the capture spectra from the stainless steel, scattering in the reactor or shield, and other lesser sources.
