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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.
D. S. Rowe, D. E. McFeron
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1966 | Pages 319-328
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17352
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a mathematical model that describes the heat transfer in a defectively bonded flat-plate fuel element. The bond defect is assumed to exist only on one side of the fuel plate and to be either a circular spot or infinite strip in shape. Details of the general solution to the heat conduction equation for the mathematical model are shown for the strip-type defect. For a particular type of defect, the temperature distribution is dependent upon three dimensionless parameters that include the effects of defect size and the heat transfer properties of the defective fuel element. Data are provided in terms of the three dimensionless parameters that permit rapid estimates of fuel temperatures in fuel plates with strip and spot defects. These defects are assumed to be step reductions in the normal fuel-boundary conductance. Defect sizes on the order of a couple of fuel thicknesses can cause significant local increases in the fuel temperature and fuel-surface heat flux.
