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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.
Wataru Shinoda, Susumu Mitake
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 3 | June 1969 | Pages 372-388
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A18735
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigated the xenon-induced spatial oscillations in boiling-water cooled reactors by the use of a three-dimensional xenon dynamics code FILE-6, which solves the one-group neutron diffusion equation simultaneously with the steady state thermo-hydrodynamics equations and with the iodine-to-xenon equations in the time domain. The stability limit of the first azimuthal mode in terms of the void coefficient of reactivity was found to be in a 500 MWe heavy-water-moderated boiling-light-water-cooled reactor. When the height of the reactor core is larger than 7 m, the first axial mode becomes unstable for a void coefficient of +0.05. It has also been shown that (i) a positive (negative) void coefficient may have a stabilizing (destabilizing) effect on the axial higher modes depending on the inlet subcooling, (ii) the mode coupling between the axially zeroth and the first modes through voids has a stabilizing effect, and (iii) when the first azimuthal mode is oscillating, higher harmonics are excited in some of higher modes through the nonlinear reactivity feedback.