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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.
R. W. Moir, R. H. Bulmer, T. K. Fowler, T. D. Rognlien, M. Z. Youssef
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 317-326
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Chamber Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A354
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A power plant based on a spheromak device using liquid walls is analyzed. We assume a spheromak configuration can be made and sustained by a steady plasma gun current, which injects particles, current and magnetic field, i.e., helicity injection, which are transported into the core region. The magnetic configuration is evaluated with an axisymmetric freeboundary equilibrium code, where the current profile is tailored to support an average beta of 10%. An injection current of 100 kA (125 MW of gun power) sustains the toroidal current of 40 MA. The magnetic flux linking the gun is 1/1000th of the flux in the spheromak. The geometry allows a flow of liquid, either molten salt, (flibe-Li2BeF4 or flinabe-LiNaBeF4), or liquid metal such as SnLi, which protects most of the walls and structures from damage arising from neutrons and plasma particles. The free surface between the liquid and the burning plasma is heated primarily by bremsstrahlung, line radiation, and some by neutrons. The temperature of the free surface of the liquid is calculated and then the evaporation rate is estimated from vapor-pressure data. The impurity concentration in the burning plasma, about 0.8% fluorine, is limited to that giving a 20% reduction in the fusion power. The divertor power density of 620 MW/m2 is handled by high-speed (100 m/s) liquid jets. Calculations show the tritium breeding is adequate with enriched 6Li, and a design is given for the walls not covered by flowing liquid (~15% of the total). We identified a number of problem areas needing further study to make the design more self-consistent and workable, including lowering the divertor power density by expanding the flux tube size.