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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.
E. Aalto and Å. Krell
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 2 | February 1967 | Pages 433-440
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18282
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron and gamma-ray attenuation have been studied in a cylindrical duct, length-to-diameter ratio = 7, partly (36 vol%) filled by a helical (screw-like) steel plug with an adjustable number of turns. The total neutron leakage through the duct decreased by a factor of 6 when the number of turns increased from 0 to 0.5; and by an additional factor of 3 in going from 0.5 to 2 turns (saturation value). The leakage with less than 0.5 turns is governed by the fast flux and above 0.5 turns by the epithermal flux., It is shown that the neutron attenuation (in the saturated case) can be satisfactorily predicted by homogenizing the plug and by combining the attenuation calculated in an infinite layer thus obtained with that predicted in a circular duct. The prerequisite is that the attenuation curves obtained are displaced in the streaming direction by the diameter of the duct., The attenuation of gamma rays in the saturation case (≈3 turns) equals that predicted in a homogenized infinite material without the duct attenuation.
