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Latest News
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.
Tsuyoshi Hoshino, Kentaro Ochiai, Yuki Edao, Yoshinori Kawamura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 386-389
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T35
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Li2TiO3 advanced tritium breeders with excess Li (Li2+xTiO3+y) are stable in a reducing atmosphere at high temperatures. Although the tritium release properties of tritium breeders are documented in databases for DEMO blanket design, no in situ examination under fusion neutron (DT neutron) irradiation has been performed. In this study, a preliminary examination of the tritium release properties of advanced tritium breeders was performed, and DT neutron irradiation experiments were performed at the fusion neutronics source (FNS) facility in JAEA. Considering the tritium release characteristics, the optimum grain size after sintering is <5 µm. From the results of the optimization of granulation conditions, prototype Li2+xTiO3+y pebbles with optimum grain size (<5 µm) were successfully fabricated. The Li2+xTiO3+y pebbles exhibited good tritium release properties similar to the Li2TiO3 pebbles. In particular, the released amount of HT gas for easier tritium handling was higher than that of HTO water.
