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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.
Sagid Salah and T. F. Parkinson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 1 | September 1966 | Pages 59-66
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have measured the thermal-neutron spectrum throughout the unit cell of several D 20-moderated natural-uranium lattices using both differential and integral methods. For the differential measurements the neutron diffraction method was used, and for the integral measurements, space-dependent spectra were deduced from activation of gold and lutetium detectors. To obviate the numerous corrections normally required for the diffraction method, the total efficiency of the crystal spectrometer was determined using a beam with a known spectrum from a D2O thermal column. Satisfactory agreement was found between the activation measurements and theoretical results obtained with the THERMOS Code. However, effective neutron temperature changes derived from the differential spectra were systematically lower than the THERMOS calculations. Some uncertainty remains as to the precision of the differential spectra due to the method of calibration and the perturbing effect of the beam tube. Nevertheless, most of the measured spectra are in reasonably good agreement with calculated spectra.