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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.
C. R. Adkins, T. E. Murley, M. W. Dyos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 3 | June 1969 | Pages 336-350
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A18732
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The well-known approximations used for finding multigroup cross sections and the Doppler coefficient are examined to determine their validity. The method involves comparing the approximate methods of one fast-reactor cross-section code (MC2) with a more rigorous treatment which removes most of the approximations. The unresolved resonance region makes a considerable contribution to the Doppler coefficient in fast reactors, and this region is treated more precisely by generating pseudo resonances using random sampling techniques within the Breit-Wigner single level formalism. A procedure is developed which ensures that the generated pseudo resonances are consistent with measured pointwise data. The resonance data is used in an ultra-fine energy group integral transporttheory code which treats the space-dependent slowing down problem in a very precise manner. A numerical comparison between the approximate methods used in MC2 and those used in the more rigorous calculations is made for a mixed carbide, sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor. Aside from some very significant detailed differences, it is shown that the approximations used in MC2 are not too severe, and that the code is adequate for determining the multigroup cross sections and the Doppler coefficient. The more rigorous method is a very time consuming and detailed procedure not well suited for design calculations. It is intended to serve as a standard, to which more approximate methods can be compared.