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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.
Yi Xu, Hong Li, Feng Xie, Jianzhu Cao, Jiejuan Tong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 671-678
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1290949
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) is one of the six proposed Generation IV reactor concepts. The HTR-10, a 10 MW high temperature gas-cooled reactor was a helium cooled, graphite-moderated, and thermal neutron spectrum reactor. Since tritium (H-3) has an effect on the environment and public radiation dose, it has received more and more attention in the environmental impact assessment of nuclear facilities. Recently, several experiments on source terms in HTR-10 have been run, of which preliminary measurements indicated H-3 was an important nuclide in the primary loop of HTR-10. The production mechanism, distribution characteristic, reduction route, and release type of total H-3 in HTR-10 were analyzed and discussed in this technical note. A theoretical model was established to calculate the total activity of H-3 in the reactor core and activity concentration of H-3 in the primary loop of HTR-10. This model indicated that the majority of total H-3 was produced by ternary fission reactions and H-3 in the primary helium was mainly generated from activation reactions of impurities in the reactor core. The research results can provide useful information for the experimental measurement of H-3 in HTR-10, and promote the study of H-3 in high temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs).