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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.
Dumitru Serghiuta, John Tholammakkil
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1513-1528
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1570751
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper reviews the attributes and challenges of applying the functional failure concept and the use of Best-Estimate Plus Uncertainty methods in evaluating protective systems in the risk space. As an illustrative example, the paper uses the case of the effectiveness of CANada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor shutdown systems. A risk-informed formulation is first introduced for estimation of a reasonable limit for functional failure probability using the Swiss Cheese model. In the real application, there are several challenges in realistically estimating probabilities of exceeding a prescribed design or regulatory limit. Key challenges discussed in this critical review include the use of complex, computationally intensive predictive models; modeling completeness; assumptions about input distributions; validation; separation of uncertainties; and selection of statistical model and algorithms. The use of hybrid deterministic-probabilistic methods may address these challenges to a certain extent.