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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.
L. E. Beghain, F. Hofmann, S. Wilensky
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 1 | January 1967 | Pages 80-84
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18044
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A pulse of monoenergetic fast neutrons of several nanoseconds duration is used to excite a lead assembly. The neutron decay is measured as a function of assembly size with conventional nanosecond time-of-flight equipment. The neutron detector is biased to eliminate all nonelasticly scattered neutrons. A theoretical relationship has been developed by Paik which relates the assembly size to the measured decay constant. The nonelastic cross section appears as a parameter in Paik's theory and can be chosen to give the best fit to the experimental data. Decay constants were measured at 2.1 and 1.7 MeV for lead assemblies 20-in. wide x 20-in. high and thicknesses from 1 to 8 in. Paik's theory assumes the establishment of an asymptotic spacial decay mode. This assumption was verified by measuring the neutron decay at various positions of the assembly. The results show that it takes the order of 10 to 15 nsec to establish a spacial mode. This method has been used to measure the total nonelastic cross section for lead at 2.1 and 1.7 MeV.
