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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.
Thomas Holschuh, Scott Watson, David Chichester
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1336-1345
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1599613
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility, located at Idaho National Laboratory, restarted transient operations in 2018 following an extended shutdown. It is of interest to establish a methodology and capability to obtain an accurate estimate of the total number of fissions produced in a fissionable test item during a transient at TREAT. Uranium wires were irradiated in TREAT as part of a transient prescription test program, and gamma-ray spectrometry was performed on the wires following irradiation using a high-purity germanium detector. Many fission products are useful for estimating the number of fissions produced in a sample using gamma-ray spectrometry; at TREAT with the time periods used for analysis, the isotopes of interest include 95Zr, 95Nb, 103Ru, 140Ba, and 140La. The number of fissions per gram of 235U determined from these measurements establishes an estimate for future experiments to be performed in the core when a similar configuration is used with a similar transient prescription.
