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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.
N. Spinks
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 30 | Number 2 | November 1967 | Pages 182-187
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A17329
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
From an empirical choice of the shadowing of one control-plate element by another, expressions are derived for the reactivity worth of systems of circumferential control plates. The expressions contain three parameters which are determined when independent calculations of three control systems have been made. The parameters can be expressed in terms of the worth of the complete control plate, the increase in reactivity due to unshadowing of an end of a control plate and the decay constant of the assumed exponentially decaying shadowing function. Application of the expressions to a particular reactor design, where circumferential control plates separate core from radial reflector, shows that the analysis is accurate for those situations where the number of control plates is not large. The analysis neglects neutron absorption by the edge of a control plate so that it underestimates reactivity worth in situations involving large numbers of control plates where the surface area of the plate edges becomes significant.
