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Latest News
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.
Steven J. Pemberton, Ryan P. Abbott, Per F. Peterson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 378-383
Technical Paper | Chambers and Chamber Wall Protection Methods | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A281
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The use of swirling annular vortex flow inside beam entrance tubes can protect beam-line structural materials in chambers for heavy-ion inertial fusion energy (IFE) applications. An annular wall jet, or vortex tube, is generated by injecting liquid tangent to the inner surface of a tube wall with both axially and azimuthally directed velocity components. A layer of liquid then lines the beam tube wall, which may improve the effectiveness of neutron shielding, and condenses and removes vaporized coolant that may enter the beam tubes. Vortex tubes have been constructed and tested with a thickness of three-tenths the pipe radius. Analysis of the flow is given, along with experimental examples of vortex tube fluid mechanics and an estimate of the layer thickness, based on simple mass conservation considerations.
