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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.
Hoai-Nam Tran, Yasuyoshi Kato, Peng Hong Liem, Van-Khanh Hoang, Sy Minh Tuan Hoang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1460-1473
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1601470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the investigation of minor actinide (MA) transmutation in supercritical CO2-cooled and sodium-cooled fast reactors (S-CO2-FR and SFR) with the thermal output of 600 MW(thermal) for simultaneously attaining low burnup reactivity swings and reducing long-life radioactive waste. Minor actinides are loaded uniformly in the fuel of the cores, and the MA contents are determined to minimize the burnup reactivity swings. In the S-CO2-FR, the burnup reactivity swing is minimized to 0.11% ∆k/kk’ when the MA content is 6.0 wt%. In the SFR, the MA content was determined to reduce the burnup reactivity swing while maintaining sodium void reactivity under a design limitation of 5 $. The burnup reactivity swing of the SFR is reduced to 1.94% ∆k/kk’, whereas sodium void reactivity is about 4.7 $ when 10.0 wt% MAs are loaded. The low burnup reactivity swing enables minimization of control rod operation during fuel burnup. The number of control rods in the two reactors is reduced to ten, which is half of a typical sodium-cooled mixed-oxide fuel MONJU reactor without MA loading. The MA transmutation rates in the S-CO2-FR and SFR are 42.2 and 52.2 kg/year, respectively, which are equivalent to the production rates in seven and nine light water reactors of the same electrical output.