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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.
S. Rosanvallon, M. Benchikhoune, S. Ciattaglia, J. Elbez Uzan, O. Gastaldi, B. C. Na, N. Taylor
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 855-860
ITER | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12553
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ITER will use tritium as fuel. Procedures and processes are thus put in place in order to recover the tritium that is not used in the fusion reaction, including from waste and effluents. The tritium thus recovered can be re-injected into the fuel cycle. Moreover, tritium content and thus outgassing may be a safety concern, because of the potential for releases to the environment, both from the facility and from the final disposal (subjected to stringent acceptance criteria in the current waste final disposal). The aim of this paper is to present the measures considered to deal with the specific case of tritium in the liquid and solid waste that will arise from ITER operation and decommissioning. It concerns the processes that are considered from the waste production to its final disposal and in particular: the tritium removal stages (in-situ divertor baking at 350°C and tritium removal from solid waste and liquid and gaseous effluents), the removal of dust contamination (dust containing tritium produced by plasma-wall interaction and by the maintenance/refurbishment processes) and the measures to enable safe processing and storage of the waste (wall-liner in the hot cell facility to limit concrete contamination and interim storage enabling tritium decay for waste that could not be directly accepted in the host-country final disposal facilities).