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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.
Shinji Ebara, Hiroyuki Nakaharai, Takehiko Yokomine, Akihiko Shimizu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 786-790
Technical Paper | Nuclear Analysis and Experiments | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1586
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the high flux test module of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility, temperature control of irradiated specimens are done by gas cooling and electric heating. The width of cooling channels is supposed to be 1 mm in the module vessel which is a rectangular duct with wall thickness of 1 mm. Since there is large pressure difference up to several atmospheric pressure between the inside and outside the vessel, it is considered that the vessel wall and the cooling channels easily deforms. In order to estimate cooling performances for the coolant flowing in the deformed channel, we conduct a finite element analysis of turbulent heat transfer in a mildly curved channel using large-eddy simulation. It is found from the simulation that heat transfer on the concave wall drastically changes according to local change in flow aspect such as separation while that on the opposite flat wall is affected only by average flow velocity and is not largely changed by the channel deformation.