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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.
Akiko Hamada, Makoto Kobayashi, Rie Kurata, Masato Suzuki, Hajimu Yamana, Toshiyuki Fujii, Yasuhisa Oya, Kenji Okuno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 399-402
Materials Development & Plasma-Material Interactions | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12388
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Annihilation behaviors of irradiation defect and, correlation of these behaviors with deuterium trapping and desorption in gamma-ray irradiated Li2TiO3, which is one of the candidates for tritium breeding material, were studied by means of an ESR(Electron Spin Resonance) method and TDS (Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy). From the ESR spectra, gamma-ray irradiation induced irradiation defects such as E'-centers, oxygen-hole centers which were expected to be tritium trapping sites. These irradiation defects were annihilated in the temperature range of 500-650 K. From the TDS spectra for Li2TiO3 exposed to D2 gas, the deuterium desorption behavior was found to consist of four stages, corresponding retention as the surface, in E'-center and as hydroxides bound with Ti or Li. In addition, most of deuterium was released as water form around 400, 550 and 650K. By comparison of the amounts of the deuterium retentions with or without the gamma-ray irradiation, the retention of deuterium trapped with the irradiation defects was increased by gamma-ray irradiation, indicating that the irradiation defects like E'-centers induced by gamma-ray irradiation would be one of the tritium trapping sites in tritium breeding materials. The activation energy of hydrogen isotope desorption from the E'-center was estimated to be 0.63 eV for gamma-ray irradiated Li2TiO3, showing good agreement with that of the recombination reaction between the E'-center and the oxygen-hole center. These results indicated that the tritium desorption was governed by the annihilation of the E'-centers.
