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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.
J. W. Kim, T. C. W. Wong, F. K. W. Tang, A. Reid
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1427-1430
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12699
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For safe and efficient operation of the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station's Tritium Removal Facility (DTRF), it is necessary to track the amount of operational tritium inventory within the DTRF's process systems. Previous methodology that tracks operational tritium inventory is based on performing a tritium mass balance and does not provide an instantaneous way to determine inventory in the DTRF. The estimate of operational tritium inventory using this method is susceptible to increasing cumulative error of approximately ±2.6% per day as the DTRF continues to operate. Current methodology attempts to compensate for this cumulative error by assuming a constant value for operational tritium inventory whenever Mass 5 is detected by mass spectroscopy of tritium drawoff gas. However, this assumption is flawed and introduces significant error to the estimation of operational tritium inventory. A new method based on temperature of the cryogenic high tritium distillation (HTD) process is proposed which can track operational tritium inventory in a more instantaneous fashion and provides a result with a constant error of ±14% that does not increase over time.