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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.
C. Rabiti, A. Alfonsi, A. Epiney
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 104-118
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-143
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
PHISICS (Parallel and Highly Innovative Simulation for INL Code System) is a reactor physics package developed at the Idaho National Laboratory. It is composed of several modules: a nodal and semistructured transport core solver (INSTANT), a depletion module (MRTAU), a time-dependent solver (TimeIntegrator), a cross-section interpolation and manipulation framework (MIXER), a criticality search module (CRITICALITY), and a fuel management and shuffling component (SHUFFLE). The PHISICS code has been coupled to the RELAP5-3D thermal-hydraulics code. Flexibility in the coupling among the different modules and with RELAP5-3D allows for several new integrated computational schemes and improvements with respect to current available options using NESTLE/RELAP5-3D. These schemes will be described in this paper. Moreover, the whole PHISICS package is fully parallelized, using the Message Passing Interface protocol. This allows for reduced computational times, while providing the capability to solve very detailed problems.
