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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.
A. Rastas, J. Saastamoinen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 3 | June 1969 | Pages 351-360
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A18733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron rethermalization has been studied, experimentally and theoretically, in a system intended to reproduce the conditions of the Kottwitz problem. Terphenyl and light water were used as the moderators at the temperatures 223 and 11°C, respectively. The energy spectrum of the angle-dependent neutron flux perpendicular to the plane discontinuity was measured in terphenyl as a function of the distance from the discontinuity by means of an extraction channel and a choppertime-of-flight analyzer. The spatial behavior of the flux-weighted average energy was determined by fitting a Maxwellian to each measured spectrum using the method of the least squares. This spatial behavior could be satisfactorily described by a simple one-exponential function for distances exceeding 3 mm (measured from the discontinuity). The least-squares fit gave a value of 11.3 mm for the relaxation length. The theoretical calculations were performed by an approximate method using the “two overlapping-groups” approximation for the energy dependence. For the angular dependence of the flux, both the Pn(n =1,3)- and the DPn(n = 1)-approximation was used. Three different scattering models were used for each moderator. Rather good agreement with the theory and the experiment was achieved as to both the form of the spectrum and the spatial behavior of the average energy.