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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.
R. Pampin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 4 | November 2006 | Pages 528-537
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lithium-lead is a candidate tritium-generating material in conceptual designs of magnetic fusion power plants. Its prolonged utilization, ultimately during the entire lifetime of such a facility, has the potential to minimize amounts of active waste and improve the economic performance. Limits to a prolonged use are production of long-lived radioactive waste and depletion of lithium and reduction of the tritium production rate to levels where self-sufficiency is compromised. The methodology and calculations performed to estimate the transmutation of LiPb following its prolonged irradiation in two of the models in the European Power Plant Conceptual Study are presented. It is shown that no waste requiring permanent disposal is expected regardless of the irradiation length. Time-dependent tritium generation is discussed: Lithium replenishment seems unavoidable, but depletion rates are found to be lower than assumed in the design. The effect of the LiPb flow pattern in the irradiation history proves to be crucial in order to support these results.