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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.
B. J. Merrill, T. D. Marshall, H. Y. Khater, S. Malang, C. P. C. Wong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 375-381
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Tritium and Safety and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A363
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This article summarizes the results of the safety evaluation of the Evaporation of Lithium and Vapor Extraction (EVOLVE) W-alloy first wall (FW) and blanket concept. We have analyzed the EVOLVE design response during a confinement bypass accident. A confinement bypass accident was chosen because, based on previous safety studies, this accident can produce environmental releases by breaching the primary radioactive confinement boundary of EVOLVE, which is the EVOLVE vacuum vessel (VV). As a consequence of a bypass accident, air from a room adjoining the reactor enters the plasma chamber by way of a failed VV port. This air reacts with the high temperature metals inside of the VV to release energy in the case of a lithium spill, or to mobilize radioactive material by oxidation, and then transport this material to the environment by natural convection airflow through the failed VV port. We use the MELCOR code to analyze the response of EVOLVE during this accident. Based on these results, the EVOLVE concept can meet the no-evacuation dose goal set by the DOE Fusion Safety Standard if the EVOLVE confinement building ventilation system is closed within two hours of the onset of this accident.
