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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.
K. Liger, P. Trabuc, X. Lefebvre, M. Troulay, C. Perrais
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 455-458
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T53
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the framework of the development of fusion thermonuclear reactors, tritiated solid waste is foreseen and will have to be managed. In France, the long-term management of all radioactive waste is under the responsibility of the national waste management agency (ANDRA), which sets out strict specifications on waste drums before their acceptances in disposal. Among all these specifications, the related ones for tritium concern limitations in terms of activity and tritium degassing. The latter is the subject of research developments to improve its control. The degassing tritium can be under the form of tritiated hydrogen, tritiated water and, in some specific cases, negligible amount of tritiated volatile organic compound. Hence, considering the major forms of degassing tritium, CEA has developed a mixed-compound dedicated to tritium trapping in drums. Based on several experiments, the foreseen mixed compound is composed of MnO2, Ag2O, Pt and molecular sieve, the three first species having the ability to convert tritiated hydrogen into tritiated water and the last one acting as a trap for tritiated water. This paper aims at describing the formulation of the mixed solids compound and presenting the first results of experimental lab-scale tests performed on purely tritiated waste confined in a small reactor. It is observed that the rate of tritium degassing from the reactor is reduced drastically during several months by means of the presence of the mixed compound.