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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.
O. K. Tallent, J. C. Mailen, K. E. Dodson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | November 1985 | Pages 417-425
Technical Paper | Chemical Processing | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33694
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The chemical degradation of normal paraffin hydrocarbon (NPH) diluents both in the pure state and mixed with 30% tributyl phosphate (TBP) was investigated in a series of experiments. The results show that degradation of NPH in the TBP-NPH-HNO3 system is consistent with the active chemical agent being a radical-like nitrogen dioxide (NO2) molecule, not HNO3 as such. Spectrophotometric, gas chromatographic, mass spectrographic, and titrimet-ric methods were used to identify the degradation products, which included alkane nitro and nitrite compounds, alcohols, unsaturated alcohols, nitro alcohols, nitro alkenes, ketones, and carboxylic acids. The degradation rate was found to increase with increases in the HNO3 concentration and the temperature. The rate was decreased by argon sparging to remove NO2 and by the addition of butanol, which probably acts as a NO2 scavenger.
