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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.
Yoshi Hirooka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1040-1044
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering and Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1632
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the successful steady state operation of deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion reactors, helium (He) ash needs to be removed continuously from the burning core, along with unburned hydrogenic fuel particles, to sustain the power generation. This will require enormous particle pumping capabilities despite the fact that helium is the most difficult gas to be pumped by means of cryogenic condensation. In the present work, zero-dimensional, four-reservoir (core-plasma, SOL-plasma, gas-phase, and wall material) global particle balance modeling has been conducted for both DT-fuel and He-ash particles. Modeling results indicate that, for the density control of He-ash particles in the burning core, passive wall pumping via codeposition with eroded plasma-facing materials would definitely be necessary to compensate for the lack of pumping speed provided by conventional vacuum equipment. Recent experimental data on helium codeposition with lithium have been used as input for modeling and results indicate that lithium-gettered moving-surface plasma-facing components can meet the He-ash pumping requirements.