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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.
Kazuya Furuichi, Kazunari Katayama, Hiroyuki Date, Toshiharu Takeishi, Satoshi Fukada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 458-464
Technical Note | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-969
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, tritiated water was poured in a packed bed of natural soil and subsequently distilled water was poured in the bed to recover tritium retained in the soil at room temperature. From tritium balance, 22.5 % (7.1 MBq) of input tritium (31.5 MBq) was retained in the soil bed. By distilled water purge, 70 % (5 MBq) of retained tritium was recovered but 30% (2.1MBq) was left. To recover residual tritium, the soil was immersed in distilled water for 531 days but the amount of tritium released to distilled water was slight (0.04 MBq). A part of the soil immersed in the water was taken out and heated up to 300°C under humid oxygen atmosphere. Tritium release terminated at about 50 hours. 11 % (0.23 MBq) of retained tritium was released. By heating to 1000°C, the release amount of tritium increased proportionally to the time and additional 4% (0.09 MBq) was released at 5 hours. The desorption rates of tritium in each process was quantified.
Tritium is quite slowly released from the natural soil exposed to tritiated water in water at room temperature. However, a long time heating by 1000°C would be required to try to recover all tritium from the contaminated soil positively, although tritium recovery was not completed in this work.