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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.
Martin Becker
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 3 | March 1968 | Pages 458-464
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A17588
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The most general current formulations of the point reactor kinetics equations permit the flux shape function to be time dependent. This permissibility has led to the development of a class of space-time analyses referred to as adiabatic or quasistatic. The use of time-independent importance weighting, however, can lead to difficulties, as is shown in an example. In this paper, point kinetics equations are derived from a variational principle in such a way as to permit time-dependent importance shape functions. “Extra” terms due to the explicit time dependence of the shape functions appear, and normalization conditions are obtained by which these terms can be eliminated. Additional differences from conventional form appear if one chooses to use different importance shape functions for flux and precursor equations, but these differences can be neglected for many cases of practical interest.
