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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.
Cornelis H. M. Broeders
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 96-110
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The incentive of the Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe (KfK) advanced pressurized water reactor (APWR) investigations is the improvement of uranium utilization in a modem Federal Republic of Germany pressurized water reactor (PWR) by replacement of the core with a high converting one. The high conversion ratio is obtained by using mixed oxide (UPu)O2 in a tight light-water-moderated triangular lattice. The harder neutron spectrum leads to higher conversion ratios, to higher fissile enrichment and fissile inventories, and to worse reactivity behavior after coolant density changes. That means that core modification of the PWR shifts its neutron physics properties in the direction of fast reactor characteristics. The analysis of available calculational methods for fast and thermal reactors showed that neither the WIMS/D code, reliable for thermal reactors, nor the approved KAPROS fast reactor code can adequately predict the reactivity of an APWR in all configurations between normal and a totally voided core. A newly developed procedure, KARBUS, within the KAPROS fast reactor code system combines the advantageous features of thermal and fast reactor calculational methods. The preliminary validation for fast, epithermal, and thermal lattices, including burnup behavior, indicates that KARBUS is an adequate tool for the APWR investigations at present. Improvements in the detailed analysis of a final APWR design and of APWR neutron physics experiments in progress are briefly discussed. Parametric calculations for a simplified model indicate that current KfK proposals for homogeneous and heterogeneous APWR cores are nearly optimum concerning the competitive properties conversion ratio and void effect in a critical core poisoned by reactor control or by fission products.
