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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.
Fernando Ferrante, Stuart Lewis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 3 | March 2021 | Pages 413-423
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1775451
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work explores recent developments in severe accident analysis and risk assessment to inform and expand on these perspectives. Variations in nuclear reactor safety policy, reactor designs, extent of use of risk information in decision making, and other aspects can impact how safety policies regarding nuclear installations are developed and implemented. In particular, the relationship of nuclear policy in the United States is explored with regard to quantitative risk criteria or goals and their relationship with health objectives. In the United States and many countries around the world, health objectives are defined with regard to the potential impact to the public in terms of “early” fatalities and “latent” fatalities. This paper discusses how the link between these health objectives and quantitative risk goals have been developed and how recent information may change the perspective originally held when the policies were established (e.g., that there would be a significant margin between the risk of operating nuclear facilities and these goals). Given that these metrics play a significant role in how current risk applications are used for operating nuclear reactors, especially when results are to be compared with thresholds, it is important to recognize the evolution and current understanding of associated embedded margins. Given the additional 30 years of insights, the expansion of risk application in the commercial nuclear reactor industry, and improvements in methodologies and computing capabilities, significant additional information has been gained. These insights are discussed and presented in this paper.