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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.
Aigars Vitins, Vitalijs Zubkovs, Gunta Kizane, Elina Pajuste, Valentina Kinerte
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1143-1146
Blanket and Breeder Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12617
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, we present results on tritium release from the beryllium pebbles irradiated for 294 full power days from 17 April 2003 to November 2004 to the neutron fluence of 1.5-2 × 1025 m-2 (E>1 MeV) at temperature 523-773 K in the pebble-bed assemblies (PBA) experiment in the high flux reactor (HFR) at Petten, the Netherlands. Stages of gradual and burst release are evident in the tritium release of the PBA Be pebbles at a temperature ramp of 2.3-4.8 K/min from room temperature to 1310-1520 K. These two stages may be related to the tritium release by atomic diffusion and bubble venting respectively. The main maximum of the tritium release rate of the PBA Be pebbles was found to be in the temperature ranges of 1178-1309 K and 1178-1350 K at the temperature ramps of 2.4 and 4.8 K/min respectively. The tritium inventory and abundance ratios of chemical forms of tritium localized in the pebbles were determined with dissolution methods. The total tritium inventory in the PBA Be pebbles was found to be 2-4 GBq/g.
