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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.
Vincent Ialenti
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1377-1393
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1868890
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Drawing on 32 months of interview-based ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines Finland’s “mankala” nuclear energy companies through the lens of anthropological theories of corporate form. Mankalas are limited liability companies run like zero-profit cooperatives that bring together consortia of Finnish corporations and municipal energy providers to purchase, finance, and share the output of jointly owned energy-generation facilities. They have long been associated with “uniquely Finnish” modes of trust, cooperation, societal cohesion, and transparency. In recent years, however, political-economic uncertainties have destabilized Finland’s mankala circuit, impacting how, whether, and when mankalas Teollisuuden Voima Oyj and Fennovoima have pursued new reactor projects. This has impacted reactor technology suppliers abroad, including France’s Areva, Germany’s E.On, and Russia’s Rosatom. With that in view, this paper explores whether anthropological analysis of Finland’s mankala corporate form can inspire new strategies for institutional innovation and reactor project financing for nuclear energy organizations. To chart out avenues for collaboration between anthropologists and nuclear energy practitioners, it concludes by proposing three pathways through which anthropological sensibilities could inform institutional decision making. I term these pathways holism, tracking and translation.