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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.
W. A. Coleman, R. E. Maerker, F. J. Muckenthaler, and P. N. Stevens
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 2 | February 1967 | Pages 411-422
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18280
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Extensive Monte Carlo calculations were performed to determine the distribution in energy and angle of neutrons reflected from steel-reinforced concrete for five incident directions and ten incident energy groups extending from 0.5 eV to 200 keV. The reflected distributions were determined in terms of a doubly differential albedo for each of 54 emergent directions for each energy group lying between and including the incident group and the tenth group (0.5 to 1.8 eV). The standard deviation of the doubly differential albedo averaged around ten percent. The angular slowing down density of the incident epicadmium neutrons within the slab was computed at 0.5 eV and was used as the source distribution for a Monte Carlo single-velocity diffusion calculation using 0.025-eV cross sections. From the diffusion calculation, the differential angular albedos of the reflected subcadmium neutrons and the depth distributions of captures occurring at subcadmium energies were obtained. Measurements of the differential angular albedo of emergent subcadmium neutrons due to a measured spectrum of incident monodi-rectional beams of epicadmium neutrons were performed at the ORNL Tower Shielding Facility in an experiment geometrically identical to that previously reported for incident subcadmium beams. Of the 35 common points of calculation and measurement, the two largest discrepancies are 23 and 36%; the remaining 33 comparisons produced a root-mean-square deviation of 4.5%.