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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.
Sümer Sahin, Haci Mehmet Sahin, Adem Acir
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 250-255
Fusion-Fission Hybrids and Transmutation | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13428
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Large quantities of weapon grade (WG) plutonium have been accumulated in the nuclear warheads. Plutonium and heavy water moderator can give a good combination with respect to neutron economy. TRISO type fuel can withstand very high fuel burn up levels. The paper investigates the prospects of utilization of TRISO fuel made of WG-plutonium in CANDU reactors. Three different fuel compositions have been investigated: 1: 90 % ThC + 10 % PuC, 2: 70 % ThC + 30 % PuC and 3: 50 % ThC + 50 % PuC. The temporal variation of the criticality k and the burn-up values of the reactor have been calculated by full power operation up to 17 years. Calculated startup criticalities for these fuel modes are k,0 = 1.6403, 1.7228, 1.7662, respectively. Attainable burn up values and reactor operation times with the same fuel charge will be 94 700, 265 000, 425 000 MW.D/MT and ~ 3.5, 10, 17 years, respectively. These high burn ups would reduce fuel fabrication costs and nuclear waste mass for final disposal per unit energy drastically.
