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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.
Tristan T. Utschig, Michael L. Corradini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 4 | December 2003 | Pages 791-802
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A416
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pulsed power experiments for basic physics investigations as well as inertial confinement fusion designs have developed Z-pinch technologies that produce terawatt level power using multiwire arrays. The energy released from such pulsed power tests results in fragmentation and vaporization of structures at the central wire array as well as shock wave propagation to the chamber boundaries. Practical design and safety considerations require that tracking of this shock front and the associated gas-debris field be done for a variety of experimental configurations to predict the arrival time of hazardous or radioactive debris at fast closure valve locations. A novel computational model has been developed to handle gas expansion into vacuum using a computer model (TEXAS) operating on a Eulerian mesh. Upon expansion of a high-pressure gas into a region of hard vacuum where free molecular transport dominates, the transport model switches between a traditional Eulerian continuum mechanics model and a free molecular transport model across the interface between the two regions. The interface location then propagates along the mesh as the gas expands. This new quasi-one-dimensional model (TEXAS-NCV) has been implemented and tested for two benchmark cases. Such a model can be useful in the design of inertial fusion systems.