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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.
Peter H. Titus, Matteo Salvetti
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 163-168
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A327
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
All three burning plasma experiments discussed at Snowmass during the summer of 2002, use preloaded structures to resist some component of the operating loads. For the resistive pulsed reactors, it is the preloads which introduce the most noticeable creep responses because these loads are applied for much longer than the operating loads. If the preloads are maintained during shut-down and maintenance periods, then the structure experiences the preload stresses at room temperature. OFHC copper has significant creep behavior, predominantly at high stress and high temp, but copper experiences finite creep even at cryogenic temperatures. The Beryllium copper used in the FIRE inner leg has better creep properties than OFHC copper.The purpose of these analyses is to characterize the influence of creep on the magnets of the Fusion Ignition Research Reactor (FIRE) and compare it with the creep response of the other proposed burning plasma experiments. The concern is that the desirable features provided by coil preloads will be lost over the lives of the experiments. Structural finite element models of FIRE and IGNITOR are used with creep equations derived from NIST[6] data to explore the structural sensitivity of the machines to creep. For both FIRE and IGNITOR, copper coil material, creep has been found to have a minimal effect on magnet performance. IGNITOR's generally lower stresses (with respect to FIRE's BeCu TF stresses) and the use of active as well as passive preload systems helps reduce creep to acceptable levels. FIRE's structure is more sensitive to creep due to the free standing wedged TF coil, but the BeCu used in FIRE's inner TF legs has a much lower creep behavior than ETP or OFHC copper. This reduces creep to acceptable levels. For FIRE, however, there is some creep in the horizontal legs which relaxes some of the support of the inner leg. Recommendations are presented to support the OFHC copper horizontal legs more effectively. More work is needed to address the multiple load-unload cycling effects on creep.
