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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.
D. B. MacMillan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 39 | Number 3 | March 1970 | Pages 329-336
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE70-A19994
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical method is described for the computation of the probability distribution of neutron populations in a point reactor with a weak source. The author and his colleagues have previously described a method for doing such computations, and G. I. Bell has described a different method; the present paper uses ideas from both of these older methods plus new formulations for computing the probability distribution from values of the generating function, for evaluating the probability distribution of precursor decay rates instead of that of neutron populations, and for evaluating the effect of short neutron lifetime without using unnecessarily short time steps in numerical integration. As a result, the method presented here is more widely applicable and more accurate than the older methods. The reactor model used here permits taking account of six delayed-neutron precursor groups and of finite neutron lifetime.