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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.
Yuto Takeuchi, Yasushi Yamamoto, Satoshi Konishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 756-760
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1581
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper proposes a conceptual design of hydrogen production system with unused biomass wastes and steam generated from high temperature nuclear power systems including fusion reactor. A reaction of interest is expressed as a formula, (C6H10O5)n + nH2O => 6nH2 + 6nCO, which is accompanied by a large quantity of endothermic reaction. Basic experiments have been made of thermal decomposition of cellulose, specimen as biomass resource, with the aid of high temperature steam of 1000 deg C heated by an infrared image furnace. The endothermic quantity was evaluated from a numerical model in which measured temperatures are employed. The numerical results for endothermic quantity agreed well with the theoretical value of 816 kJ/mol. To discuss the technical feasibility of the present process, the conceptual design of a hydrogen production reactor system of heat exchanger type was made with the numerical results and heat transfer correlations for helium and steam flow. The present biomass based process, producing both electricity and more hydrogen than other processes such as water or steam electrolysis using an equivalent quantity of heat source, is characterized as an efficient hydrogen production method using nuclear thermal energy, which simultaneously contributes to reduce biomass wastes.