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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.
A. Robinson, L. El-Guebaly, D. Henderson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 720-724
Nuclear Analysis & Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Every few years, maintenance will be required to replace the plasma facing components of any fusion power plant. To come up with a realistic maintenance scheme, an accurate method of evaluating the biological dose rate is needed. In some studies, the simple and quick approach of the contact dose rate for a specific component was used to estimate the biological dose rate. This method doesn't take radiation from nearby components into account and the accuracy of its methodology is questionable. The more accurate multi-step method, which involves transporting the delayed gammas from induced activation in the forward or adjoint mode, is able to take radiation from all surrounding components into account. In this report, the biological dose rate was evaluated with the adjoint method at selected radial locations of ARIES-CS, and then compared to the contact dose rate of the nearest component to determine the accuracy of the contact dose method. Our results indicate that the approximate contact dose rate could be off by an order of magnitude.
