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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.
Blair P. Bromley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 546-560
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-851
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A study of computational/analytical neutronics and heat transfer has been carried out for different types of gas-cooled fuel bundle lattices that could be used for the sub-critical fertile/fissionable blanket of a cylindrical-geometry hybrid fusion-fission reactor (HFFR) with thorium-based fuels. The HFFR concept envisioned is one with a simple cylindrical geometry, using an anticipated variant of a magnetic mirror to confine a deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion plasma. The annular-cylindrical blanket is approximately 10 meters long and 2 meters thick, and is a repeating lattice of pressure tubes filled with 0.5-meter fuel bundles that are made of (233U,Th)O2, and refuelled continuously on-line, sharing technological features with pressure-tube heavy water reactors (PT-HWR) and the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (AGR) in the U.K.. With a 2-meter thick blanket, the average fissile content in the blanket needs to be at least 2.5 wt% in order for the HFFR system to be self-sustaining in power.
