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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.
S. Gordeev, F. Gröschel, V. Heinzel, W. Hering, R. Stieglitz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 618-624
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-948
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
IFMIF (International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility) is an accelerator based deuteron-lithium (D-Li) neutron source to simulate the neutron irradiation field in a fusion reactor. The target assembly of the IFMIF consists of the flow conditioners and the nozzle, which has to form a stable lithium jet. This work focuses on a numerical study of the flow conditioner efficiency, in which two different types of flow conditioners are compared by means of a detailed numerical analysis with respect to specific hydraulic effects in the pipe elbow and the inflow conditioners. The adequateness of two modelling approaches - Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) - to simulate an unstable flow through a 90° bend of circular cross section has been examined. Both methods investigated exhibit a reasonable agreement with the experimental data, but the DES approach does not require a very fine grid resolution and is less time consuming. The further conducted numerical analysis of the flow conditioner uses a DES approach. The calculations show that a honeycomb-screen combination is not capable to suppress effectively large scale swirl motions emerging from the bend. A frequency analysis of the static pressure fluctuation reveals instabilities in the shear layer between the separation zone and the accelerated outer region, which additionally increase the inhomogeneity of the axial velocity distribution.
