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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.
M. A. Tavel, B. E. Clancy, and G. C. Pomraningt
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 29 | Number 1 | July 1967 | Pages 58-66
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A17810
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A use of the variational method which has been neglected in reactor theory is discussed. This is the invariance theorem of E. Noether which has been widely utilized in other areas of mathematical physics. Following a derivation of the theorem, its use to obtain solutions of the time-independent diffusion equation is demonstrated. The theorem is used to construct a complete analogy between the time-dependent diffusion process and classical mechanics. Certain “conservation laws” arise in the construction of this analogy and their possible application is discussed. An analogy between the neutron diffusion equation and the time-dependent Schroedinger equation is also given. Several suggestions for generalizations of Noether's theorem for use in reactor theory are made.
