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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.
G. Strydom, A. S. Epiney, A. Alfonsi, C. Rabiti
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 15-35
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-146
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Parallel and Highly Innovative Simulation for INL Code System (PHISICS) has been under development at Idaho National Laboratory since 2010. It consists of several modules providing improved coupled core simulation capability: INSTANT (Intelligent Nodal and Semi-structured Treatment for Advanced Neutron Transport) (three-dimensional nodal transport core calculations); MRTAU (Multi- Reactor Transmutation Analysis Utility) (depletion and decay heat generation); and modules performing criticality searches, fuel shuffling, and generalized perturbation. Coupling of the PHISICS code suite to the thermal-hydraulic system code RELAP5-3D was finalized in 2013, and as part of the verification and validation effort, the first phase of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD/NEA) MHTGR-350 benchmark has now been completed.
The theoretical basis and latest development status of the coupled PHISICS/RELAP5-3D tool are described in more detail in a concurrent paper. This paper provides an overview of the OECD/NEA MHTGR-350 benchmark and presents the results of exercises 2 and 3 defined for phase I. Exercise 2 required the modeling of a stand-alone thermal fluids solution at the end of equilibrium cycle for the Modular High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (MHTGR). The RELAP5-3D results of four subcases are discussed, consisting of various combinations of coolant bypass flows and material thermophysical properties. Exercise 3 required a coupled neutronics and thermal fluids solution, and the PHISICS/RELAP5-3D code suite was used to calculate the results of two subcases.
The main focus of this paper is a comparison of results obtained with the traditional RELAP5-3D “ring” model approach against a much more detailed model that includes kinetics feedback on individual “block” level and thermal feedbacks on a triangular submesh. The higher fidelity that can be obtained by this block model is illustrated with comparison results on the temperature, power density, and flux distributions. It is shown that the ring model leads to significantly lower fuel temperatures (up to 10%) when compared with the higher-fidelity block model and that the additional model development and run-time efforts are worth the gains obtained in the improved spatial temperature and flux distributions.
