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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.
S. Tassan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 2 | October 1966 | Pages 271-276
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A28169
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermal spectrum measurements in 1% enriched uranium, 0.387-in. diam rod lattices, light water moderated, have been performed by the lutetium activation method in order to test the usefulness of this technique in not-well-thermalized lattices. Dysprosium-164 and 175Lu were used as reference thermal-neutron detectors. The experimental results are presented as the average values of the normalized (lattice/Maxwellian) activation ratios of 176Lu/Dy and 176Lu/ 175Lu with the pertinent cadmium-ratios, in the fuel and in the moderator over the H2O/U range from 1:1 to 4:1. The agreement with the results of a calculation performed using the THERMOS code is satisfactory. It is concluded that the 176Lu/Dy set appears to be adequate for the thermal spectrum analysis of light-water-moderated lattices, while the 175Lu/Dy set can provide rather accurate integral data for the epithermal component of the neutron spectrum.
