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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.
Sevim Tan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 30 | Number 3 | December 1967 | Pages 436-447
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18403
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A solution of the zero-power kinetic equations for sinusoidal excess reactivity insertions, previously obtained by the author by Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approach (WKB), is further discussed. Explicit equations for the reactor period, reactivity bias, and stabilized reactor response, within the range of applicability of the method, are derived. Harmonic contents of the logarithm of flux for both pure and properly biased sinusoidal reactivity variations are analyzed. Fourier components of flux yielding the new steady-state mean power, the fundamental and the second harmonic are given. Results of the treatment are extended to the describing function of a low-power nuclear reactor and the major error involved in the earlier literature is indicated. The procedure, although developed under the assumption of one average group of delayed neutrons, is expected to yield very satisfactory results even if generalized to multigroup treatment.