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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.
Keiichi Saito, Yukichi Taji
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 30 | Number 1 | October 1967 | Pages 54-64
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A17242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Statistical aspects of neutron transport in low-power reactors are studied from the viewpoint of branching processes. The probability generating function of a neutron population originating from an ancestor neutron is expressed in the form of the factorial moment expansion, and it is shown how a factorial moment is constructed out of the lower-order moments. The formalism is based on a physical statement that neutrons occupying a certain set of the prescribed space-time points are composed of subgroups which are chain related to the closest common branching point. The statement is found to be a natural extension of Feynman’s derivation of the well-known formula for Variance-to-Mean Ratio Method of measuring reactor noise. The form of the factorial moment expansion of the one-ancestor problem is applied to counting statistics in reactors with random sources. The result turns out to be the factorial cumulant expansion of the probability generating function of count number. It is shown that all the higher factorial cumulants are successively constructed out of the lower orders. New adjoint fields are introduced. It is pointed out that analysis of reactor noise depends on two models of introducing extraneous neutrons into the system, i.e., the random source model and the burst-of-neutrons model.