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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Ethan Coffey, Tim Bigelow, Ira Griffith, Greg Hanson, Arnold Lumsdaine, Claire Luttrell, David Rasmussen, Chuck Schaich, Bill Wolframe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 383-387
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-962
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Finite element analysis calculations are performed to determine the temperature profile in sections of the ITER Electron Cyclotron Heating (ECH) transmission line waveguide. Each aluminum, corrugated waveguide transmission line will transmit up to 1.5 MW of electromagnetic radiation over roughly 200 meters from a 170 GHz gyrotron to heat the plasma in the tokamak. The “ridged tube” waveguide has integral water cooling traces which are lined with copper tubing. Each transmission line includes miter bends which may be actively cooled and waveguide couplings, where the waveguide cannot be actively cooled due to coupling hardware. The amount of cooling water available is limited, so determining the required amount of water in the cooling lines is essential. Finite element computational analyses are performed to determine the effect of the heat load and water cooling on the temperature profile of the waveguide in various steady-state cases.