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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.
J. E. Houghtaling, J. E. Grund
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 3 | June 1969 | Pages 412-426
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A18738
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reactor kinetics investigations have been performed for cold-start-up, hot-start-up, hot-standby, and operating-power reactivity accidents using the UO2-fueled, pressurized-water type SPERT-III reactor. Power excursion behavior was predicted for every SPERT-III experiment by digital computer calculations using the SPERT-developed PARET code. Extrapolations for severe cold-start-up excursion consequences were obtained from severe transient tests on SPERT-III fuel samples in the SPERT-IV capsule driver core. Analyses of the SPERT-III data show that prompt moderator heating was as significant as the Doppler effect in limiting the magnitude of power excursions in the SPERT-III core at operating temperatures. Comparisons of calculations and experimental data demonstrate that PARET is capable of predicting power excursion behavior in SPERT-III within experimental uncertainty for the range of conditions investigated. The SPERT-III integral-core tests also provide a broad base of experimental data for demonstrations of the capabilities of other existing models in predicting non-damaging power excursion behavior in UO2-fueled reactors.
