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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.
Graiciany de Paula Barros, Claubia Pereira, Maria A. F. Veloso, Renan Cunha, Antonella L. Costa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 256-261
Fusion-Fission Hybrids and Transmutation | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13429
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accelerators Driven Systems (ADS) are an innovative type of nuclear system, which is useful for long-lived fission product transmutation and fuel regeneration. The ADS consist of a coupling of a sub-critical nuclear core reactor and a proton beam produced by a particle accelerator. These particles are injected into a target for neutrons production by spallation reactions. The neutrons are then used to maintain the fission chain in the subcritical core.The aim of this study is to investigate the nuclear fuel evolution of a lead cooled accelerator driven system used for energy production and high-level waste transmutation. The fuel studied is a mixture based upon 232Th-233U and Pu-MA extracted from PWR spent. The target is a lead spallation target and the core is filled with a hexagonal lattice. In order to reduce the negative reactivity caused by the presence of protactinium, moderator is not used.In this work is used the Monte Carlo code MCNPX 2.6.0, that presents the depletion/burnup capability, combining a ADS source and kcode-mode. The keff evolution, the neutron energy spectra in the core and the nuclear fuel depletion during the burnup are evaluated. Keywords: ADS, thorium, MCNPX.
