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Latest News
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.
Mahmoud Z. Youssef, Russell Feder, Kelly Thompson, Ian Davis, Gregory Failla
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 718-725
Nuclear Analysis | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8993
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The new feature of the ATTILA 3-D code to calculate dose rates in a given geometry was benchmarked using the dose rate experiments performed at the FNG 14.1 MeV source facility located at ENEA, Frascati, Italy. Two experimental campaigns were performed. Post irradiation measurements were undertaken using Geiger-Müller, TLD, and tissue-equivalent scintillators. Other measurements were also performed during irradiation. ATTILA results were compared to the experimental data and to the results of the MCNP Monte Carlo code published earlier. The calculations were performed through three consecutive steps using the same ATTILA code along with its built-in activation library, FORNAX. The ANSI/ANS6.1.1-77 and ICRP74 Ka flux-to--dose conversion factors were used. Good agreement with the experimental data and the MCNP results was obtained for times >7 d after irradiation in the 1st campaign but large underestimation was found at shorter time steps. Both dose rates and integrated gamma fluxes are largely underestimated (∼20-40%) in the 2nd campaign.
