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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.
Changle Liu, Damao Yao, Lei Li, Jie Zhang, Hao Yang, Yang Qiu, Xiang Gao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 423-428
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-246
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutral beam injection (NBI) is a high-power auxiliary heating system for the EAST device. We present a thermal shield (TS) structure to protect the neck pipe of the EAST equatorial port to avoid damage from the NBI beam. Since the EAST port has a big trumpet structure, a straight section, and a small trumpet structure, to accommodate the port structure, a TS concept is put forward including its cooling system. The cooling loops and the sub-branches were designed with interfaces between the inner cooling branches. The heat removal capability is verified by a thermal hydraulics analysis based on ANSYS code. In particular, fabrication is addressed with technical processing technology, especially for the embedded cooling pipes in the heat sinks. The pipes are checked for leaks after bending and the embedding processing. The assembly activities are demonstrated in the spatial space zones of the port before the engineering installation. It is confirmed that the TS structure is safe and will run feasibly in the EAST discharge. It is indicated that the TS structure can provide thermal shielding and remove heat for the NBI device in the port region.
