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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.
Roberto Baratti, Anna Maria Polcaro, Pier Francesco Ricci, Antonio Viola, Giancarlo Pierini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 2 | September 1986 | Pages 266-274
Technical Paper | Tritium System | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24978
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical model has been developed to determine the amount of tritium that permeates the cooling circuit of a tritium breeding blanket containing the liquid eutectic alloy 17Li-83Pb. This model, which has been applied to phase 2A of the International Tokamak Reactor/Next European Torus project, is used to predict the effect of the operating conditions of the blanket, as well as those of a spray tower employed as a tritium recovery unit, and the kinetic parameters for the permeation and desorption processes. The results of this theoretical study indicate that the amount of permeated tritium proved to be not very different for the maximum [10.82 kPa1/2 · m3(mol · T)−1] and minimum [0.7 kPa1/2 · m3(mol · T)−1] values of Sievert's constant (Ks) existing in literature. This amount, moreover, can be reduced to 0.1 to 0.01 g/day of tritium by the presence of small oxide barriers (a permeation reduction factor of α ≅ 100) on the cooling tubes and by the easy operating conditions of the spray tower, which include a droplet diameter of 0.5 mm; a tritium pressure of 0.13 kPa at 673 K; and a residence time of 0.5 s.
