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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.
Sylvian Kahane, Yair Ben-Dov (Birenbaum), Raymond Moreh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages 115-126
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2102847
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monoenergetic gamma beams (Δ ~ 10 eV) based on thermal neutron capture, in a nuclear reactor, using the V(n,γ) and Fe(n,γ) reactions were utilized for generating fast neutron sources from lead and thallium, respectively, via the 207Pb(γ,n) and 205Tl(γ,n) reactions. It so happens that one of the incident gamma lines of the V source, Eγ = 7163 keV, photoexcites by chance a resonance level in 207Pb, which emits neutrons at an energy of 423 keV. In a similar manner the incident gamma line at Eγ = 7646 keV of the Fe(n,γ) source photoexcites by chance a resonance level in the 205Tl isotope, which emits neutrons at an energy of 99 keV. The cross sections for the neutron emission process were measured and found to be σ(γ,n) = 35 ± 6 mb and 107 ± 17 mb, respectively, with intensities of the order of 104 n/s.
