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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.
Ahmad Al Rashdan, Vivek Agarwal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 8 | August 2019 | Pages 1053-1061
Technical Paper – Special section on Big Data for Nuclear Power Plants | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1601469
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The migration of paper-based work packages to an electronic version for the nuclear power industry results in opportunities for work optimization through data analytics and integration. This can only be achieved if the work package is broken into its data elements and stored in a structured data form. The contribution of this paper is the development of a set of guidelines that enables creating a data model from breaking the work package into its data elements. The data model can be used to create a common information model for work packages at nuclear power plants. The results presented and discussed in this paper highlight distinctive data model characteristics regarding the work element properties and associations; work package topology; properties cascade; elements and properties function; templates and instances; and steps flow. In total, 13 guidelines were identified as part of this work. The resulting benefits from the extracted data model are enabling step-level review of the work, reducing planning effort, and automating work package creation and formatting. In addition, coupling work process data with other data sources at the plant improves overall maintenance activity efficiency by enabling capabilities such as real-time schedule update and automatic allocation and release of work resources.