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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.
Frigyes Reisch
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1966 | Pages 378-384
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17360
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a digital computer controlled system it is possible to monitor several variables almost at the same time and control the system according to the most critical one. This is called a sampled-data control system. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how to handle such a problem. A simplified reactor system including neutron kinetics and fuel and cooling medium kinetics with a simple control circuit is examined. It is assumed that the reactor has a great number of cooling channels, and it is necessary to check the exit temperatures of the cooling medium as the maximum value is the limiting factor. Sampling is performed to accomplish this. The temperatures are scanned and a comparison is made between the value stored in the memory and the point being measured. The higher of the two values remains in the one word memory. After checking all the temperatures, a pulse representing the temperature of the hottest channel is sent through the sampler to the regulator and the memory is cleared. A suitable method to study the stability is the z transform analysis. The procedures and logic followed are outlined here. First, the system is defined in the terms of Laplace transformation. Then the solving of the sampled system problem by the z transform theory is shown. A digital computer program is developed. The results of several calculations show the importance of choosing the right parameter combinations.