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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.
Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Hidenori Miura, Takumi Hayashi, Shuichi Hoshi, Toshihiko Yamanishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 711-715
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Tritium, Safety, and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1574
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To obtain performance data of atmosphere detritiation system at the off normal events such as SF6 release for the safety of ITER, the detritiation experiment was planned and performed at Tritium Process Laboratory (TPL) in Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) using a small scaled detritiation system for the oxidation performance test which can process gas flow rate of 0.06 m3/hr in once through. The detritiation system consists of two oxidation catalyst beds (473K and 773K) for converting hydrogen isotopes and tritiated methane in compounds to water vapor and a bubbler for removing water vapor. SF6 gas is used as an electric insulation gas of Neutral Beam Injection system (NBI) in ITER, and is expected to be released in an accident such as fire. In this time, the performance of oxidation catalyst bed of the detritiation system for hydrogen under existence of SF6 which are released from NBI was investigated.The SF6 gas was notably decomposed in the case of the catalyst bed temperature higher than 623K. In addition, when 0.05% or more of SF6 was introduced with 1% of hydrogen, a part of the water produced by the 473K catalyst bed was reduced to hydrogen due to the reaction with the decomposed gas in SF6. Consequently, the detritiation factor (D.F.) of the detritiation system was decreased to less than 50 from > 10000 of its initial value. Since the effect of SF6 depends on its concentration closely, the amount of SF6 released into the tritium handling area in an accident should be reduced by some ideas of the arrangement of components using SF6 in the buildings.
