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Latest News
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.
F. Cismondi, G. Aiello, S. Kecskes, G. Rampal
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 123-127
ITER Systems | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12338
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Six different breeding blanket concepts will be tested in ITER under the form of six different Test Blanket Modules (TBMs). In the frame of the activities of the European TBM Consortium of Associates the Helium Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB-TBM) and the Helium Cooled Lithium Lead (HCLL) Test Blanket Modules are developed in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and in CEA Saclay respectively. For each EU TBM concept, four different TBMs will be installed into one dedicated ITER equatorial port and tested during different test campaigns. The main goal of the ITER TBM program is providing DEMO relevant experimental data for the three main functions of a blanket module of a future fusion reactor, namely removing heat, breeding tritium and shielding sensitive components from radiation.The two EU TBMs share a common external structure (the so called TBM box) while featuring a different internal design of the Breeder Units (BUs), reflecting the different breeding concept. The preliminary design assessment of the two TBMs boxes is based on nuclear analyses and on the evaluation of the power produced in the BU and deposed on the TBM box structures. The preliminary thermomechanical designs have been presented and are based on steady state analyses.The TBMs will work under ITER loads, i.e. cyclic loads defined by the typical ITER pulses. Transient thermal and mechanical analyses of the two EU TBMs under a typical ITER pulse are presented in this paper, identifying the main design issues related to: structural behavior of the TBM box, codes and standard rules for assessing the TBM box integrity, TBM operational domain and related DEMO relevancy of the experimental campaign. Solutions to improve the weak structural points of the present designs are proposed, identifying the missing rules and the modelling development needs.
