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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.
Neil B. Morley, Jonathan Burris
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 74-78
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - MFE Chamber Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A313
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fairly recently, a new experimental free surface liquid metal MHD facility, the so-called MTOR facility, has come on-line, and new data has been taken concerning flows of gallium alloy across a moderately strong toroidal field with characteristic 1/R field gradient. The purpose of these experiments has been two-fold: to gather data for benchmarking currently existing one and two dimensional free surface computational flow models (as well as 3D models currently under development), and to investigate phenomena not predicted by models, especially effects of nozzles, drains, waves and turbulence. Data is presented concerning MHD effects on the mean flow height and wave structure, both with and without the so-called Zakharov magnetic propulsion current added to help control and stabilize the flow. The test section is wide enough so that the characteristic factor (Hartmann Number * Aspect Ratio) is less than unity. In this case the Hartmann layer drag effects are small, allowing comparison of experimental data to two-dimensional axisymmetric models. Preliminary conclusions suggest that the field gradient in these experiments does not adversely affect the stability of the surface, and that magnetic propulsion current is effective in flattening and accelerating the liquid metal flow.