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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.
Keitaro Kondo, Ali Abou-Sena, Frederik Arbeiter, Jörg Brand, Ulrich Fischer, Dennis Große, Axel Klix, Lei Lu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 228-234
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-743
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) is an accelerator-based intense neutron source to test fusion reactor materials under irradiation conditions expected to be experienced by a future fusion power plant (DEMO). The Tritium Release Test Module (TRTM) is intended for the irradiation of solid breeder ceramics as well as beryllium involving in-situ tritium release measurements in IFMIF. During the EVEDA (Engineering Validation Engineering Design Activities) phase, a detailed engineering design for the TRTM has been elaborated. A new 3-dimesional Monte Carlo geometry model of TRTM was prepared for a neutronic analysis directly from engineering CAD data using the McCad conversion software developed at KIT. The analysis was performed with the latest version of the Monte Carlo code McDeLicious, an enhancement to MCNP5 for IFMIF neutronics calculations, using a state-of-the-art nuclear data library FENDL-3. The result emphasizes the importance of the neutron reflector which should be placed behind TRTM in order to make the irradiation properties close to the European HCPB DEMO. Although the achievable dpa is lower than that expected in DEMO, the T/dpa and He/dpa values can be simulated very well when the neutron reflector is appropriately designed, in particularly by utilizing beryllium.
