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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.
Barbora Gulejová, Richard Pitts, David Tskhakaya, David Coster
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 48-55
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12404
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Although the most complex currently available fluid-neutral Monte-Carlo plasma boundary code package, SOLPS, has been a major player in the ITER divertor design, it has not yet been systematically used for the study of kinetic phenomena such as ELM transients. This paper investigates the relevance of fluid code results for transients, in particular at the targets where kinetic effects are most manifest, by comparing power and particle fluxes at the targets from SOLPS5 time-dependent simulations of TCV Type III ELMs with those obtained from dedicated Particle-in-Cell (PiC) kinetic transport code (BIT1) simulations. Although reasonable agreement is found in terms of the absolute magnitude of total heat fluxes, the arrival of the ion pulse at the target from upstream is significantly faster in SOLPS than expected on the basis of sonic transit times (as also seen in PiC). Adjustments of kinetic heat flux limiters to render the heat fluxes more convective in SOLPS are necessary in order to correct for this discrepancy. Moreover, because SOLPS does not account for the transfer of heat from electrons to ions inside the sheath, correction terms to the electron and ion power fluxes at the targets are required in SOLPS in order to better match PiC results. However, it does not appear possible within the scope of these sensitivity studies to simultaneously achieve expected delays and ion-electron power sharing in the fluid simulations.