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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.
T. S. Krolikowski, L. Leibowitz, R. O. Ivins, S. K. Stynes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 38 | Number 2 | November 1969 | Pages 161-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19521
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical model was developed to predict the burning rate and burning temperature of a single spherical sodium particle moving through air or air depleted in oxygen. The model is based on the assumption that the reaction rate is controlled by the diffusion of oxygen to a combustion zone surrounding the particle. A quasi-steady state approach and an averaging technique were used to correlate the reaction rates of individual spray particles with the theoretical burning rate of a spray and the theoretical pressure rise in an enclosing volume. The theory correctly predicted the direction and magnitude of experimentally observed variations in reaction rate with respect to oxygen content, spray velocity, and particle size. The spray particle size was found to be the most important parameter when considering the sprayed sodium-air reaction.
