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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.
K. Shure, J. A. O'Brien, D. M. Rothberg
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 35 | Number 3 | March 1969 | Pages 371-375
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A20016
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effective removal cross sections for iron and lead that can be applied to fast-neutron dose rate calculations have been determined from calculated spatial-spectral neutron distributions as a function of succeeding polyethylene thickness. These cross sections increase with polyethylene thickness, and for large polyethylene thicknesses, they are in agreement with those derived from experiment. From the spatial-spectral neutron distributions, relative contributions of various neutron energy ranges to the neutron dose rate have been calculated as a function of succeeding polyethylene thickness. For polyethylene thicknesses > 30 cm, fast (E > 302 keV), epithermal (302 keV > E > 0.625 eV), and thermal (E < 0.625 eV) neutrons contribute 83, 6, and 11%, respectively, to the neutron dose rate.
