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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Sonja D. Schmid
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1312-1328
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1837584
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recent American “mini-series” on Chernobyl, widely watched across the world, presented viewers with the concluding finding that this massive accident had occurred because the reactor design had inherent flaws; flaws that were known but not previously fixed because it was “cheaper” that way. The reactor design in question is the RBMK, and this paper will argue that this design was far from “cheap,” neither then nor now, and that its adoption as the second standard design for the Soviet Union’s nuclear power reactor fleet was based on much more than economic considerations. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to forget that reactor designs are always chosen for a multitude of reasons and never solely based on their technical or economic merits. Based on archival research, interviews, and industry publications, I show that approving and building RBMK reactors made good sense at the time, despite later claims to the contrary. Then I take the examples of a small modular reactor (SMR), the proposed NuScale Power Module, and a fast neutron reactor, TerraPower’s proposed Traveling Wave Reactor, to argue that we witness comparable negotiations today, as new designs for reactors (1) attempt to fit into existing safety and regulatory frameworks, (2) navigate security and nonproliferation concerns, and (3) embody visions of a specific sociotechnical order. I conclude that technical designs never occur in a socioeconomic, political, or cultural vacuum; instead, they are developed by people steeped in social norms, regulatory concerns, and economic expectations of a specific time and place. In the spirit of making this point relevant to practitioners, I will suggest ways of making these implicit frameworks visible, to actively and consciously start tweaking them, while staying aware of the implications that technical choices may have on our social expectations and vice versa.