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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Fernando R. Urgorri, Carlos Moreno, Elisabetta Carella, Jesús Castellanos, Alessandro Del Nevo, Ángel Ibarra
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 444-449
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Water Cooled Lithium Lead (WCLL) blanket is one of the four breeder blanket technologies under consideration within the framework of the EUROfusion Consortium activities. The aim of this work is to develop a preliminary model that can track tritium concentration and tritium fluxes along each part of the WCLL blanket and its ancillary systems at any time.
Because of tritium’s nature, the phenomena of diffusion, dissociation, recombination and solubilization have been taken into account when describing the tritium behavior inside the lead-lithium channels, the structural materials and the water coolant circuits. The simulations have been performed using the object oriented modeling software EcosimPro.
Results have been obtained for the pulsed generation scenario of the European demonstration power plant (DEMO). The tritium inventory in every part of the blanket has been computed. Permeation rates have been calculated as well allowing to know how much tritium ends up in the coolant system and how much remains in the liquid metal. The amount of tritium extracted from the lead-lithium loop has been also obtained. All this information allows having a global perspective of tritium behavior all over the blanket at any time.
The model provides valuable information for the design of the WCLL blanket. More complex upgrades are planned to be implemented based on this model in future stages of the EUROfusion project.
