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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.
Thomas Holschuh, Nicolas Woolstenhulme, Benjamin Baker, John Bess, Cliff Davis, James Parry
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1346-1353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1559712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility restarted transient operations in 2018 and has met or exceeded expectations for reactor experiments. TREAT’s flexibility in power shaping provides the ability to prescribe a variety of operating conditions for test specimens, including shaped transients, steady-state irradiations, natural pulses, and clipped pulses, to deliver the necessary energy deposition and energy deposition rate. The initial operations following the TREAT restart were designed to mimic historical operations to confirm TREAT’s capability. Then, studies were performed to evaluate the minimum pulse width possible in the facility as well as reactor power profiles characteristic of a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA); both were achieved with excellent results.
This paper highlights the following:
1. The TREAT facility has been restarted to resume nuclear fuel safety research.
2. Initial reactor operations have mimicked historical operations.
3. A minimum pulse width has been achieved by control rod reinsertion during pulse.
4. Power profiles characteristic of a LOCA accident were performed.