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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.
Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Takumi Hayashi, Toshihiko Yamanishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1041-1044
Contamination and Waste | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12594
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fusion reactor requires high levels of safety and public acceptability, so safeconfinement of tritium is one of the key issues. Tritium must be well controlled with no excessive release to environment and no excessive workers exposure. Especially, the hot cell and tritium facility of ITER will use various construction materials such as the concrete and the organic materials. Since the concrete materials will be contaminated by tritium compared with the metal materials such as SS, it is very important to study the tritium behavior on the materials from the viewpoint of the excessive exposure protection to workers. Therefore, in order to understand the tritium behavior on the concrete materials, the sorption and desorption experiment was carried out as a function of the exposure time and temperature of water in the desorption experiment. The used samples were cement paste, mortar and concrete. These samples were exposed into 740 ~ 1110 Bq/cm3 of tritiated water vapor at room temperature. The exposed time was from a day to several weeks. The exposed samples for a certain period were soaked into water at 277 K, 298 K and 343 K, and then the water was periodically measured by Liquid Scintillation Counter (LSC) and the amount of tritium sorbed on the concrete materials were evaluated. The amount of the tritium sorbed in the concrete materials reached equilibrium less than 2 months. In the desorption behavior from concrete materials to water at 277K, 298K and 343K, the tritium sorbed in the concrete materials was desorbed about 99 % for 2 days at 343 K of water. However, the tritium desorption from concrete materials was sufficiently detected though 3 months passed. In addition, the tritium profile on the surface concrete materials was measured by a tritium imaging plate.