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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.
X. R. Wang, M. S. Tillack, C. Koehly, S. Malang, H. H. Toudeshki, F. Najmabadi, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 22-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-797
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ARIES-ACT1 engineering design efforts were devoted to developing a credible configuration that allows for rapid removal of full-power core sectors followed by disassembly in hot cells during maintenance. The power core evolved with the main objective of achieving high performance while maintaining attractive design features and credible configuration, maintenance, and fabrication processes. To achieve high availability and maintainability of a fusion power plant, the power core components of a sector, including inboard and outboard first wall (FW)/blankets, upper and lower divertors, and structural ring or high-temperature shield, were integrated into one replacement unit to minimize time-consuming handling inside the plasma chamber. As with the ARIES-AT design, the FW/blanket design was based on Pb-17Li as coolant and breeder, and low-activation SiC/SiC as structural material; however, the Pb-17Li mass flow rate control, flow path, FW and blanket cooling channels, coolant access pipes, and blanket structural configuration have been revised and improved to provide about the same thermal performance (∼58% thermal efficiency) while keeping the magnetohydrodynamic pressure drop and pumping power, material temperature, and stresses at an acceptable level. Helium-cooled W or W-alloy divertor concepts were developed to accommodate a peak surface heat flux up to ∼14 MW/m2. They include a smaller finger-based divertor and a midsized T-tube and larger plate-type divertor concepts, which take advantage of a simple configuration, and the smaller number of plate units and joints in a power plant. The two-zone divertor concept, with the combination of a finger-based divertor and plate-type divertor, was selected and integrated into the ARIES-ACT1 power core. The fingers are used to accommodate the designed peak heat flux of ∼13 MW/m2, while the plate-type divertor is used for the lower heat flux region. The overall power core configuration and system integration, as well as the definitions of major power core components, such as the FW/blankets, divertor, structural ring, and the vacuum vessel, are described here and the main design features are highlighted. Sector maintenance operations have been investigated and motion demonstrations for removing the power core sectors have been performed using state-of-the-art three-dimensional CAD to analyze the clearances and spaces in all directions. The maintenance sequence and procedure for removing the replacement unit from the plasma chamber to the hot cell for exchange and refurbishment are also discussed in this paper.
