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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.
Junghee Kim, P. Andrew, R. Reichle
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 185-196
Technical Paper by Monaco ITER Postdoctoral Fellows | First Joint ITER-IAEA Technical Meeting on Analysis of ITER Materials and Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13386
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Plasma-wall interaction in fusion devices is unavoidable and leads to material erosion, dust formation, and tritium retention. Erosion of plasma-facing material and generation of dust inside ITER can significantly affect the operation. This is because the total in-vessel dust and tritium inventories during an operational campaign are required to be below limits of 1000 and 1 kg, respectively, imposed by safety considerations. To ensure respect of these limits, dust and tritium inventories should be monitored during the operational campaign of ITER. The level of erosion will be monitored by laser ranging techniques. To manage the dust inventory, local dust monitors from a number of locations will measure local dust concentration and accumulation. An additional important issue is dust lying on hot surfaces. In terms of safety, "hot dust" inventory is also strictly limited. Several techniques have been proposed to monitor the hot dust amount. Finally, the in-vessel tritium inventory must be limited and monitored. Assessment of the deficit in the tritium fuel supply is a way of measuring in-vessel tritium retention; however, this will have to be complemented by local surface analysis. Several diagnostic methods are introduced and compared with each other in order to find the most promising ITER-relevant concepts.