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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.
William E. Kastenberg, Paul L. Chambré
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 1 | January 1968 | Pages 67-79
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18009
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spatial and temporal behavior of neutron distributions governed by the nonlinear diffusion equation approximation to neutron transport theory are considered in this paper. Stability criteria for the equilibrium states of various reactor feedback models are determined by the method of comparison functions. The comparison functions are used to construct simple solutions with error bounds to the equations considered. The two reactor models considered are the prompt feedback and the adiabatic model. The stability of the equilibrium state was found to be governed by the generalized buckling κ and its relationship to μ the lowest eigenvalue of the associated linear Helmholtz equation. Negative feedback is considered in both cases. Since the comparison functions bound the true solution from above and below, one can determine absolute errors of the approximations involved when constructing solutions. In a similar fashion, a bound on the maximum value of the excursion can also be obtained with little extra effort.
