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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.
G. E. Goring
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 29 | Number 2 | August 1967 | Pages 180-188
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18526
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Established techniques for measuring thermal reactor flux and power which utilize, respectively, arbitrary placement of foils and overall heat balance, have limited accuracy and are difficult to apply. The proposed method is based on 135Xe accumulation, as manifested by control-rod positions, plus a set of relative flux factors taken over the entire core instead of only at isolated positions. The technique involves only routine operating data, and required calculations are quite manageable by machine computation. After development of the theory, application is illustrated using a set of data from the Union Carbide Nuclear Company research reactor at Tuxedo, New York. Results are quite reliable when rod positions during the shutdown period are used, but operating period ratios introduce large inaccuracies by magnification of routine imprecision in operating data. It is concluded that the method offers an easily obtainable check on the usual heat-balance information for heterogeneous reactors, particularly if applied to shutdown data or to a xenon equilibrium run.