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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.
Zahra Papi, Farrokh Khoshahval
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1050-1067
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2167462
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There is an obvious effort to increase the burnup of used fuel assemblies in the Bushehr WWER-1000 Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) in order to improve fuel utilization. The outcomes of this research could result in an increase in the BNPP reactor cycle length, which would lead to improved fuel consumption. Considering the lack of uranium resources and the planning to use new types of fuel in the BNPP, the use of integrated burnable absorber (IBA) materials is of great importance. An analysis of the performance of various IBAs, including Gd2O3-UO2, Er2O3-UO2, and Dy2O3-UO2, as well as the standard (proposed by the designer) burnable absorber (BA) (CrB2Al) in the BNPP, and their impact on fuel neutronic characteristics has been performed. Five fuel assemblies: one without a BA fuel rod and four each containing standard BA gadolinia, erbia, and dysprosia fuel pins were investigated. The neutronic properties of BAs were evaluated by the infinite multiplication factor, reactivity swing, and power peaking factor dependence on fuel burnup. Gadolinia, with a concentration of 5%, has the greatest effect on initial reactivity with 10 893 pcm and the lowest effect on the reactivity swing with 0.277 Δk among the other BAs, which leads to selecting the most appropriate BA for improving reactor core stabilities and enhancing operational safety. The gadolinium IBA extends the cycle burnup by about 1 GWd/tonne U compared to the standard BA. At the beginning of the cycle, erbium has a more uniform power distribution than the standard BA; however, at the end of the cycle, gadolinia has a more uniform power distribution.