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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.
Anisia Bornea, Catalin Petrutiu, Marius Zamfirache
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 270-273
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T8
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive software, SICA, designed to be used in water-hydrogen liquid phase catalytic exchange process (LPCE). The software calculates the water-gas catalytic isotopic exchange process, following the transfer of any H, D or T isotope from water to gas and vice versa. This software is useful both for design and laboratory-based research; the type of the catalytic filling (ordered or random) can be defined for any of these two cases, the isotopic calculation being specific to the package type. For the laboratory-based research, the performance of a catalytic packing can be determined defining the type and using the experimental results. Performance of the mixed catalytic packing is defined by mass transfer constants for each catalytic and hydrophilic package in that specific arrangement, and also for the isotope whose transfer is studied from one phase to another. Also, it has been established a link between these constants and commonly used parameters for the fillings performance defined by HETP (height equivalent of Theoretical Plate). To demonstrate the availability of the software, we presented a comparative analysis of water-gas catalytic isotopic exchange on a column equipped with three types of filling: successive layers, random or structured (ordered package filled with catalyst). The program can be used for the LPCE process calculation, process used at detritiation facilities for CANDU reactors or fusion reactors.