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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Anisia Bornea, Marius Zamfirache, Ioan Stefanescu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 532-536
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290973
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Water – hydrogen catalytic isotopic exchange is the front-end detritiation technology that is used in the pilot plant at ICSI Rm. Valcea. It is also chosen as the main technology for the Tritium Removal Facility will be built at the Cernavoda NPP, Romania. The performance of the isotopic exchange process is mainly determined by the composition of the packing used in the catalytic isotopic exchange columns of the installations. In order to have a good working the packing should consist out of two components: i) a catalyst to enable the isotopic exchange and ii) a hydrophilic packing to maximize the fluid surface that can participate in the isotopic exchange. It is important that these two components of the packing are arranged in such a way that a uniform flow along and across the exchange column is ensured. To achieve a high performance packing theoretical and experimental research that took several years was necessary. The impact of the catalyst /hydrophilic packing ratio, the structure of these materials and their mutual arrangement were investigated. Theoretical analyses based on mathematical models contributed were used to select the optimal exchange column compositions for experimental research. This paper presents a theoretical analysis developed to set up a high performance catalyst-packing mixture, as well as the developed graphical and numerical mathematical models that allowed for this analysis.