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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.
Warren H. Giedt, Jorge J. Sanchez, Thomas P. Bernat
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 588-599
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1172
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The influence of capsule wall material and the transfer gas surrounding the capsule on the time required for beta-heating-induced redistribution of a 50-50 mole percent mixture of deuterium and tritium (DT) in a spherical capsule are investigated analytically and numerically. The derivation of an analytical solution for the redistribution time in a one-dimensional binary diffusion model, which includes the thermal resistance of the capsule, is first described. This result shows that the redistribution time for a high conductivity capsule wall is approximately doubled after 8 days of 3He formation. In contrast, with a low thermal conductivity capsule wall (e.g., polyimide), the redistribution time would increase by less than 10%The substantial effect of the capsule wall resistance suggested that the resistance to heat transfer from the capsule through the surrounding transfer gas to the hohlraum wall would also influence the redistribution process. This was investigated with a spherical model, which was based on accounting for energy transfer by diffusion with a conduction heat transfer approximation. This made it possible to solve for the continuous temperature distribution throughout the capsule and surrounding gas. As with the capsule the redistribution times depended on the relative values of the thermal resistances of the vapor in the capsule and the transfer gas. With increasing vapor thermal resistance (increased concentration of 3He) redistributions times for hydrocarbon capsules were less than the minimum one-dimensional value of 27 minutes. Further analytical and experimental investigation of the thermal interaction between the capsule and hohlraum is recommended.
