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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. Gallix, P. Mijatovic
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 464-467
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology: Targets and Chambers | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1531
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a central building of the power plant, the DT fuel is formed into a very smooth and uniform layer of ice at ~18 K inside a beryllium shell; placed in a cryogenic target assembly that provides support, cooling, and thermal insulation; and put into an evacuated replaceable transfer line (RTL) at room temperature (RT). The RTL is transported and inserted into one of the reactor chambers at 923 K and shot, releasing 3 GJ of nuclear fusion energy. The DT ice layer must stay below ~19.7 K to keep its geometric integrity until shot time.Detailed transient thermal analyses of the cryogenic target assembly in the RTL were performed. They showed that, with the original design, the DT ice would reach 24.6 K by shot time. With an improved design providing better thermal insulation of the target, the ice temperature would reach only 19.1 K, meeting the requirement for successful shots.This paper compares the thermal analysis results for both designs, which included conduction and radiation effects with temperature-dependent material properties.