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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.
Hans Ludewig
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 3 | March 1967 | Pages 549-556
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An investigation was conducted to estimate the error when a flat-flux approximation is used to compute the resonance integral for a simple absorber element embedded in a neutron source. An integral equation describing the collision rate as a function of energy, position, and angle is constructed and subsequently specialized to the case of energy and spatial dependence. This equation is further simplified by expanding the spatial dependence in a series of Legendre polynomials. In this form, the effects of slowing down and flux depression may be accounted for to any degree of accuracy desired. The resulting integral equation for the energy dependence is thus solved numerically, considering the slowing down and the infinite-mass model as separate cases. From the solution obtained by the above method, the error ascribable to the flat-flux approximation is obtained. In addition to this, the error introduced in the resonance integral in assuming no slowing down in the absorber is deduced.
