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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.
R. J. Onega, P. W. Forbes, A. K. Furr, A. Robeson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 32 | Number 1 | April 1968 | Pages 49-55
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18823
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The kinetic equations for a heavy-water-moderated reactor have terms describing the production of neutrons in the photodisintegration of deuterons. A technique has been developed for the measurement of these short-lived delayed-photoneutron groups. A 235U target was placed in the center of a sphere of D2O and a chopped neutron beam from the VPI reactor was allowed to impinge on the target. The time for a revolution of the chopper varied from 86.4 to 0.463 sec in six steps and there are two pulses per revolution. The ratio of “beam-on” target time to “beam-off” target time is 1 to 16.5. During the beam-off time interval, the production rate of delayed neutron and delayed photoneutrons as a function of time was stored in a time base multichannel analyzer. The half-lives of two new delayed-photoneutron groups were determined to be 7.39 × 10−2 and 4.02 × 10−3 sec with relative abundances of 0.0292 and 0.170, respectively. The relative abundances represent the fractions of the delayed-neutron and delayed-photoneutron groups.
