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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.
T. Koehler, M. Yoda, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, D. L. Sadowski, S. Shin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 526-530
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - High Heat Flux Components | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1542
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The liquid surfaces of liquid-protected high heat flux plasma-facing components may be subject to large temperature gradients caused by non-uniform incident particle and heat flux. Thermocapillary flows due to such gradients can potentially cause dry-out in high-temperature regions. Experimental and numerical investigations have been conducted to determine the maximum allowable non-dimensional temperature gradient just before rupture in thin liquid films of various aspect ratios and viscosities . Experiments were conducted using a needle contact method to measure the liquid film height of axisymmetric silicone oil ( = 4.8 × 10-3 Ns/m2-9.6 × 10-1 Ns/m2) films for aspect ratios of 0.0065 to 0.02 on a non-isothermal stainless steel surface. The experimental data were compared with predictions from both an axisymmetric asymptotic analysis for the steady-state film height for thin layers and a direct numerical simulation using the level contour reconstruction method for thicker layers. The results of this investigation will provide component designers with experimentally-validated limits on the maximum allowable temperature radients to prevent local dry spot formation and possible burnout.
