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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.
K. Serdula, J. Young
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 22 | Number 1 | May 1965 | Pages 40-50
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A19761
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutron diffusion and integral scattering properties of graphite have been measured by the pulsed-neutron-source technique. Measurements were performed on assemblies with geometric bucklings from 0.0036 to 0.0151 cm−2. The time of attainment of asymptotic neutron-energy spectra was determined from transmission measurements. Results from these latter measurements indicated that the minimum thermalization time, for the assemblies investigated, was ≈ 2 msec. Asymptotic ‘average’ neutron velocities, measured both internally and externally, were obtained as a function of assembly size. Results indicated that an asymptotic neutron spectrum did not exist for assemblies with B2 ≈ 0.015 cm−2 at a time 2 msec after the neutron pulse. A value of the diffusion cooling coefficient, C = 45.6 ± 4.7 × 105 cm4/sec was derived from the measured ‘thermal’ neutron decay constants.
