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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.
Dale E. Hankins
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 1 | September 1966 | Pages 110-116
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-1
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fission yield of an accidental assembly of a supercritical volume of uranyl-nitrate solution will depend on several variables, two of which are discussed here: the rate of reactivity addition, and the effect of the weak-neutron flux in the solution. Fission yields for a 53 g/liter uranyl-nitrate solution subjected to various rates of reactivity addition were calculated. The small number of neutrons from the solution will cause the excursion to occur after the assembly has reached a critical mass and has become slightly supercritical. The effect of the delay in initiation on the fission yield of the assembly is calculated with curves of the probability of initiation vs time. The effect on the fission yield of different neutron source strengths, the addition of sodium carbonate to the solution, and changes in the uranium concentrations of the solutions are discussed. A comparison is made of the predicted values obtained from these calculations and the reported yields from six accidental excursions.
