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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.
Sayed A. El-Mongy, Kh. A. Allam
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1474-1479
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1593012
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Precise assay of uranium enrichment without time-consuming analysis is a crucial factor in nuclear safeguards process. This paper aims at a computational development using innovative Monte Carlo (MC) method for 235U mass enrichment (%E) verification for the UF6 cylinder. This new approach focuses mainly on using different UF6 physical properties (effective volume and density) and extra 235U gamma- and X-ray transitions as input parameters for efficient calculations of %E assay. In this work, we used the measured values of the dose rate (μSv/h) due to the emitted gamma- and X-rays of 235U content at the cylinder external surface for enrichment calculations. The attenuation of the main 235U gamma- and X-energies due to the cylinder wall (5B-Type Ni Inconel alloy) was also estimated to wide range of energies using XCOM: Photon Cross Sections Database software. Using this suggested model for 235U enrichment calculation, the calculated value of 19.46 ± 1.28% is within one standard deviation of the certified value of 19.75 ± 0.40%. The mass of 235U was also estimated and found to be 2.6814 kg. Based on this improved approach, the total uranium activity of the investigated UF6 cylinder was calculated and found to be (5.52 GBq), which is 98.6% from the declared activity value (5.6 GBq). These accurate and confident calculated values are direct functions in the improved parameters and the developed MC code.
