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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. W. Bowring, C. L. Spigt
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 22 | Number 1 | May 1965 | Pages 1-13
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A19756
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Stability and burnout natural-circulation tests on an electrically heated 7-rod cluster were carried out to obtain data relevant to the Halden II reactor. The object of the tests was to measure the maximum channel powers obtainable without burnout at pressures up to 28 atm and various inlet subcoolings. The test-section heat flux was essentially uniform, but local heat-flux peaks were introduced at hot patches to probe burnout. It was found that at 28 atm and up to 6°C inlet subcooling, a channel power of nearly 600 kW could be reached without burnout or instability; increasing the subcooling further, reduced the burnout power. The instability channel power threshold was investigated and found to decrease with decreasing pressure. In addition, the natural-circulation inlet velocity was measured at various constant pressures and values of inlet-subcooler heat removal, as a function of channel power up to and in the hydraulic instability region. Flow oscillations of about 1-sec period were observed and recorded together with the burnout detector signal at trip under these conditions.
