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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. E. Sawan, S. Malang, C. P. C. Wong, M. Z. Youssef
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 510-517
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - First Wall, Blanket, and Shield | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A735
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutronics assessment has been performed for molten salt breeding blanket design options that can be utilized in fusion power plants. The concepts evaluated are a self-cooled Flinabe blanket with Be multiplier and dual-coolant blankets with He-cooled FW and structure. Three different molten salts were considered including the high melting point Flibe, a low melting point Flibe, and Flinabe. The same TBR can be achieved with a thinner self-cooled blanket compared to the dual-coolant blanket. A thicker Be zone is required in designs with Flinabe. The overall TBR will be ~1.07 based on 3-D calculations without breeding in the divertor region. Using Be yields higher blanket energy multiplication than obtainable with Pb. A modest amount of tritium is produced in the Be (~3 kg) over the blanket lifetime of ~3 FPY. Using He gas in the dual-coolant blanket results in about a factor of 2 lower blanket shielding effectiveness. We show that it is possible to ensure that the shield is a lifetime component, the vacuum vessel is reweldable, and the magnets are adequately shielded. We conclude that molten salt blankets can be designed for fusion power plants with neutronics requirements such as adequate tritium breeding and shielding being satisfied.
