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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.
L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, D. Henderson, L. Waganer, R. Raffray, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 405-409
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Tritium and Safety and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A368
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heavy ion beam driven inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants employ liquid wall materials to protect the structure against the energetic x-rays, ions, and debris emitted from the target following each shot. The objective of this assessment is to identify the radiological issues of the candidate liquid wall materials (Pb, LiPb, Sn, and Flibe) using the ARIES-IFE radiation chamber environment. The issues to be addressed include the radioactivity level and liquid waste minimization for waste management. Specifically, the liquids are evaluated with regard to the Class C limitation for waste disposal, a top-level requirement for all ARIES power plant designs. Two extreme cases were analyzed; the worst case is separation of the liquid wall material (highest radiation exposure) and the breeder (lowest radiation exposure), and the best case is the mixing of the two liquid streams. Both tangential and porous wall injection schemes were examined. Pb and LiPb are more radioactive than Sn and Flibe. For the liquid breeder system, the porous wall injection scheme with mixed liquid flows results in the lowest waste disposal rating and smallest waste stream achieved in our study.
