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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.
Guillaume Mignot, Mark Anderson, Michael Corradini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 574-578
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - First Wall, Blanket, and Shield | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A747
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The behavior of supercritical (SC) fluid during a blowdown is under investigation. A model based on a steady state Homogeneous Equilibrium Model (HEM) and conditions with and without friction is presented. Calculations indicating three different possible regimes in a blowdown scenario are calculated with this model. The single-phase flow in the supercritical region and the transition either into sub-cooled water, a two-phase fluid or a superheated gas near the critical point results in an interesting flow with a wide range of behavior. Depending on the initial conditions and the geometry either vaporization or condensation can occur either in the pipe or at the exit. In addition, these results are to be extended to other fluids like CO2, R22 or R134a by comparing thermodynamic properties and their dynamic evolution to dimensionless SC water results. Finally the design of an experiment with initial data on the depressurization of a supercritical water system is presented.
