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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.
Rei Kimura, Yuki Nakai, Tadafumi Sano, Atsushi Sakon, Satoshi Wada
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 11 | November 2023 | Pages 1859-1866
Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2212828
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experiment was conducted that demonstrates a novel core power distribution reconstruction method based on ex-core detectors using time-dependent measurement at the University Teaching and Research Reactor of Kindai University (UTR-KINKI). Although the proposed method PHOEBE was able to identify the power distribution change caused by control rods under static conditions in a previous experiment, time-dependent experiments were not conducted. Hence, the present study measured time-dependent neutron counts using ex-core detectors to reconstruct the power distribution based on PHOEBE. Extraction of the control rods was expected to cause a shift in the reactor power distribution from the north side to the south, and the results of the power distribution reconstruction also demonstrated this power shift. This result experimentally and qualitatively demonstrated the detection of time-dependent power shifts based on PHOEBE. However, quantitative verification was difficult in this study because there are no verified time-dependent three-dimensional neutronics codes available. This issue will be addressed in a future study when a code becomes available.
