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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.
Evgeny Ivanov, Giovanni Bruna, Antonio Sargeni, Franck Dubois
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1529-1539
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1627122
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As a technical support organization for French Public Authorities, the Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) shall participate in policy making on nuclear safety and radiation protection. In the framework of its current activity, the IRSN performs analysis and comparison of different safety assessment approaches, including Best Estimate Plus Uncertainty (BEPU), among others. Although BEPU is not yet recognized worldwide, the authors consider it a promising way to stimulate the involvement of a new generation of numerical tools and high-fidelity experiment data for nuclear safety assessment and development of nuclear technology. This paper discusses enabling factors and constraints for BEPU from technical and global points of view, relying on scientific background as well as current practice with respect to its potential role in regulation and, more generally, in a decision-making process.
