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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.
Mohammad Abdul Motalab, Woosong Kim, Yonghee Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1185-1204
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1582942
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper is concerned with an improved two-step methodology based on the nodal equivalence theory for more accurate and consistent CANDU reactor analysis. In addition, the albedo-corrected parameterized equivalence constants (APEC) method is introduced to achieve further improvement of the nodal solution by correcting the burnup-dependent cross sections (XSs) and discontinuity factors (DFs). The APEC algorithm is incorporated into an in-house nodal expansion method (NEM) code. Colorset calculations are performed to obtain physically meaningful leakage information of the fuel lattice, and the results are used for generating burnup-dependent APEC functions to correct groupwise XSs and DFs. The NEM-equivalent reference DF on each surface of the colorset are calculated for a coarse mesh (1 × 1 mesh per fuel assembly) using the net-current boundary conditions. These reference DFs are used to determine the DF APEC functions. A separate set of burnup-dependent APEC functions is generated for the fuel lattice loaded with a reactivity device. Both position- and burnup-dependent APEC functions are applied for accurate CANDU core analysis. A two-dimensional CANDU whole-core nodal analysis is performed to show the effectiveness of the APEC corrections. Moreover, several variants of the original benchmark are also analyzed with the same APEC functions to confirm the general applicability of the predetermined APEC functions. In addition, NEM calculations are performed for a CANDU core with a reactivity device and its variants with different burnup profiles. Numerical results show that the APEC-based two-step nodal methodology can provide an accurate and consistent solution for burned CANDU cores with reactivity device.
