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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
K. Hara, K. Munakata, T. Wajima, K. Wada, T. Takeishi, M. Tanaka, T. Uda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1339-1342
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12677
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recovery of tritium released into working areas in nuclear fusion plants is a key issue for safety. A large volume of air in the last confinement of fusion power plants should be processed by air cleanup system (ACS). In ACS, tritium gas is oxidized by catalysts, and then tritiated water vapor is collected by adsorbents. This method can remove tritium effectively, whereas high throughput of air causes higher pressure loss in catalyst and adsorbent beds. The pressure loss can be reduced by replacing the packed bed of catalysts with the honeycomb catalysts. In this study, the oxidation experiments of hydrogen in humid gases over honeycomb-type catalysts were performed, and the influence of water vapor on the rate of catalytic oxidation was investigated. The result of the experiments suggests that the rate of catalytic oxidation decreases with increasing water vapor content and its influence varies depends on the temperature. It is also indicated the rate of oxidation substantially decreases at the lower temperatures even in the case where water vapor contents is considerably lower. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the decrease in the catalytic activity by coexistent water vapor.