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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
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Latest News
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.
Yu. Balashov, A. Golubev, V. Golubeva, S. Mavrin, U. Pereligina
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1215-1219
Environmental and Organically Bound Tritium | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12649
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The processes of tritium uptake, losses, transformation and organically bound tritium (OBT) build-up in crops such as potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce and wheat were studied in a set of experiments on crop' short-term exposure to tritiated water (HTO) in a greenhouse. The crops were exposed at the stage of linear growth between blossoming and ripening. The results of experiments were used to develop a model of OBT build-up in crop's storage organs.The model allows estimate tritium uptake, losses in crop's leaves as well as its transformation in OBT and transport to storage organs of plants. The model parameters were obtained from the measured data for each crop's type by using regression analysis. The model was validated against experiments. The model can be used to assess OBT activity in storage organs of crops upon short-term exposure in the atmosphere contaminated by HTO.
