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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.
Sal B. Rodriguez, Jason Cook
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 499-505
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology: Targets and Chambers | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1538
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Z-IFE (inertial fusion energy) plant is a unique, inertial confined, fusion energy concept in which high yield targets will be ignited to fusion, yielding brief energy bursts in the 3 to 20-gigajoule range. The fusion reaction yields an energetic burst that consists principally of neutrons, X rays, and charged particles. The X rays rapidly attenuate in matter, causing the material to expand rapidly, thus generating a strong shock wave. This shock wave must be mitigated if the Z-IFE chamber is to last for a period of 30 to 50 years.ALEGRA simulations were conducted for a hypothetical Z-IFE chamber filled with argon gas and ionized by an X ray source. The calculations employed a set of sophisticated models, including Saha ionization, XSN and CDF opacities, bremsstrahlung radiation, linearized diffusion of X ray photons for a blackbody, fully-coupled magnetohydrodynamic models, electron thermal conduction, Spitzer thermal conductivity with cold material interpolation, and Mie-Gruneisen EOS.In order to obtain confidence in the results, a laser experiment from UCSD was simulated. In the experiment, laser photons were used to ionize argon gas. The simulations showed that ALEGRA quite successfully calculated the measured temperature, level of ionization, and spatial evolution of the argon plasma.