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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.
A. Rene Raffray, Myron A. Hoffman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1640-1645
Solid Breeder Blanket | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24967
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A thermal-hydraulic design study of the proposed ESPRESSO blanket for the Tandem Mirror Fusion Reactor is presented. Two solid breeder/multiplier configurations have been selected for the study: one with natural Li2O as solid breeder and no neutron multiplier and the other with 30% enriched gamma-LiAlO2 as solid breeder and Be as multiplier. A systematic procedure has been developed which effectively reduces the number of independent parameters to two, namely the neutron first wall loading and the main flow bulk temperature rise. Their effect on the maximum multiplier and breeder temperatures and on the pumping power ratio is investigated. Maximum allowable breeder and multiplier temperature constraints limit the design choice and a design point has been obtained for each case for a given maximum allowable pumping power ratio.
