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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.
Leo Bühler, Chiara Mistrangelo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 257-263
In-Vessel Components - FW, Blanket, Shield & VV | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12362
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid-metal flows in the European helium cooled lead lithium blanket are strongly affected by the intensity and the distribution of the externally applied magnetic field required for plasma confinement. An experimental campaign has been performed to investigate the pressure distribution of magnetohydrodynamic flows in a scaled model of a liquid-metal blanket module.A variety of experiments has been carried out to asses the influence of flow rates and of the strength and non-uniformity of the magnetic field on the pressure distribution in the test-section. The magnetic field available in the laboratory is characterized by a large zone of uniform magnitude and gradients at the entrance and the exit. The mock-up has been located at various positions along the magnet axis to reproduce operating conditions in which the toroidal field varies in radial direction, i.e. it changes from the back plate to the first wall. Measurements show that the magnitude of the total pressure drop in the mock-up is significantly influenced by the strength of the local magnetic field at the manifolds, while gradients across the breeder units have minor effects. This study confirms the critical role of manifolds in determining the total pressure drop in the blanket.