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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.
M. Yoda, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, ARIES-IFE Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 3 | November 2004 | Pages 451-469
Technical Paper | ARIES-IFE | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A583
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental and numerical studies of the fluid dynamics of thin liquid film wall protection systems have been conducted in support of the ARIES-IFE study. Both the porous "wetted wall" concept, involving low-speed injection through a porous wall normal to the surface, and the "forced film" concept, involving high-speed injection through slots tangential to the surface, have been examined. These initial studies focus upon the "preshot" feasibility of these concepts, between chamber clearing and the fusion event.For the wetted wall, a three-dimensional level contour reconstruction method was used to track the evolution of the liquid film on downward-facing walls for different initial conditions and liquid properties with evaporation and condensation at the free surface. The effects of these parameters on the film dynamics, the free surface topology, the frequency of liquid drop formation and detachment, the minimum film thickness between explosions, and the equivalent diameter of detached drops have been analyzed. Initial experimental results are in reasonable agreement with the numerical predictions. Generalized nondimensional charts for identifying appropriate "design windows" for successful operation of the wetted wall protection concept have been developed. The results demonstrate that a minimum repetition rate is required to avoid liquid dripping into the reactor cavity and that a minimum injection velocity is required in order to maintain a minimum film thickness over the first wall.For the forced film concept, experimental investigations of high-speed water films injected onto downward-facing flat and curved surfaces at angles of inclination up to 45 deg below the horizontal were conducted. Mean detachment length and the lateral extent of the film were measured for a wide range of liquid-solid contact angles at different values of the initial film thickness, liquid injection speed, and surface orientation. The results show that the film detaches earlier (i.e., farther upstream) for nonwetting surfaces and for flat (versus curved) surfaces. The nonwetting flat surface data are therefore used to establish a conservative "design window" for film detachment. Initial observations of film flow around cylindrical obstacles suggest that cylindrical dams are incompatible with forced films.
