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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.
Kazunari Katayama, Hiroki Ushida, Hideaki Matsuura, Satoshi Fukada, Minoru Goto, Shigeaki Nakagawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 662-668
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-968
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium production utilizing nuclear reactions by neutron and lithium in a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor is attractive for development of a fusion reactor. From viewpoints of tritium safety and recovery efficiency, tritium confinement is an important issue. It is known that alumina has high resistance for gas permeation. In this study, hydrogen permeation experiments in commercial alumina tubes were conducted and hydrogen permeability, diffusivity and solubility were evaluated. By using obtained data, tritium permeation behavior from an Al2O3-coated Li-compound particle was simulated. Additionally, by using literature data for hydrogen behavior in zirconium, an effect of Zr incorporation into an Al2O3 coating on tritium permeation was discussed. It was indicated that the majority of produced tritium was released through the Al2O3 coating above 500 °C. However, it is expected that total tritium leak is suppressed to below 0.67 % of total tritium produced at 500 °C by incorporating Zr fine particles into the inside of Al2O3 coating, assuming tritium pressure inside particle is kept at the plateau pressure of the Zr hydride generation reaction.
