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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.
Mofreh R. Zaghloul, A. René Raffray
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 27-45
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A596
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper considers the physical processes and material removal mechanisms associated with the energy deposition in an inertial fusion energy liquid wall from the prompt X-ray spectrum of an indirect-drive inertial fusion target. These are important as the ablated material could generate aerosol in the chamber, which without adequate chamber clearing could result in a chamber environment unsuitable for driver propagation and/or target injection. Simple computations were used to identify and characterize the important material removal mechanisms relevant to the energy deposition regime under consideration. Explosive boiling was found to be the most relevant thermal response mechanism due to the high heating rate from the X-ray photon energy deposition. Investigation showed that explosive boiling occurs when the material temperature approaches the critical temperature and has a threshold value that can be derived from the material equation of state or the rate of homogeneous nucleation. Another important mechanism is mechanical spall that can result when shock wave-induced local tensile stresses exceed the spall strength of the material. Both explosive boiling and mechanical spall occur upon crossing the thermodynamic stability border (spinodal curve) either through rapid heating or through overexpansion of the material.Relevant material properties of the candidate liquid wall materials needed to perform the present assessment are compiled, derived, and presented. A simple energy deposition volumetric analysis is used to estimate both thermally ablated and mechanically spalled regions of the liquid wall material. The choice of liquid/wall combination is found to play an important role in reducing or eliminating the occurrence of spall in the liquid wall.