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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. A. Heltemes, G. A. Moses
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 927-931
Technical Paper | Inertial Fusion Technology: Drivers and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1612
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The introduction of magnetic cusp fields into the High Average Power Laser (HAPL) reactor design is to prevent target ions from interacting with the armor layer. Diverting the ions and preventing their impact on the chamber armor eases thermal design constraints considerably. The BUCKY code was used to simulate thermal loads for the candidate armor materials tungsten and silicon carbide.Parametric analysis was done to ascertain the peak temperature rise in the armor due to X-rays from the HAPL target thermonuclear ignition. Temperature values as a function of chamber armor radius were obtained using initial conditions of T0 = 600 °C and xenon buffer gas pressures of 66.7, 666.7 and 6666.1 mPa (0.5, 5 and 50 mTorr). The armor radius was decreased until thermal thresholds were met (2400 °C and 1000 °C for tungsten and silicon carbide, respectively) to determine the minimum allowable radius of the HAPL chamber.A second set of parametric simulations were performed at xenon gas initial pressures of 666.7 and 6666.1 mPa (5 and 50 mTorr) and temperature of 600°C to a time of 5 ms to observe the effect of re-radiation from the buffer gas on the surface temperature of tungsten and silicon carbide.