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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.
M. M. Bretscher, W. C. Redman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 39 | Number 3 | March 1970 | Pages 368-378
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE70-A19997
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effective capture-to-fission ratio has been measured for 239Pu and 235U in a low flux fast-reactor spectrum by the reactivity-reaction-rate technique. A 252Cf source and a 6Li absorber were used to measure the relative importance of fission and absorbed neutrons, respectively. The measurements were made in Assembly 24 of ZPR-9 which was designed to produce a neutron spectrum that emphasized fission and capture events in the 0.1 to 25 keV range. For 239Pu and 235U the measured values, corrected to infinite sample dilution, were 0.516 ± 0.040 and 0.337 ± 0.029, respectively. Corresponding integral alpha values calculated from ENDF/B were 0.352 and 0.346. The experimental value for 239 is in reasonable agreement with calculations based on recent differential data obtained by both the Oak Ridge-Rensselaer and the United Kingdom groups. These calculations yielded 239Pu alpha values of 0.466 (ORNL-RPI) and 0.471 (UK).
