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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.
Dominic J. Raso and Stanley Woolf
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 2 | February 1967 | Pages 252-264
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18265
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations were performed by the Monte Carlo method to determine the dose at various detector locations behind a vertical barrier and below an adjacent horizontal barrier. Results were obtained, using two different Monte Carlo approaches, for a 1.25-MeV simulated ground source incident on 60, 40, and 20 psf of concrete. The results of the Monte Carlo calculations were used to calculate reduction factors. The above-ground reduction factors compared with those of Spencer to within 10%. The below-ground reduction factors were compared with those calculated from the OCD Engineering Manual, and the agreement in this case was found to be unsatisfactory. In some instances, discrepancies were found to be as high as a factor of 3. For the case of the open basement, agreement among the three methods was found to lie within 10 to 20%. The results obtained by the two Monte Carlo methods used were found to be in excellent agreement. These results also compared to within 10 to 15% with results of experiments performed at Technical Operations Research. The results indicate that further investigation is necessary to determine the amount of scattered radiation within a basement.