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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.
Dong Won Lee, Hyung Gon Jin, Eo Hwak Lee, Jae Sung Yoon, Suk Kwon Kim, Seungyon Cho, Hyun Gon Lee
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 680-683
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-979
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A hypervapotron mockup was fabricated and used in the Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) heating system at KAERI. During the test, especially with the JAEA ion source, which has a focused beam and a long pulse, some failures in the mockup were experienced. Using the existing correlation for a critical heat flux (CHF), the incident CHF was assessed, in which the modified Tong-75 CHF correlation for the one-sided heat flux was used. In addition, using the conventional CFD and FEM codes such as ANASYS-CFX and ANYS-mechanical, the thermal lifetimes were evaluated according to the beam operation and water cooling conditions. The evaluated ICHF is 28.6 MW/m2 and is much higher than the loaded peak heat of about 8.7 MW/m2 at a 2.3 MW heat load. The cause of failure seems not to be the CHF considering the existing correlations. The thermal lifetimes were evaluated to be about 100 cycles and 11 cycles for 1.56 MW and 2.3 MW heat load conditions, respectively. When the dump heat is reached in the mockup frequently, it can fail in the corner of the inlet region below 11 cycles when a 2.3 MW heat is loaded.
