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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. A. Modesto, E. R. Lindgren, C. W. Morrow
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 650-655
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A760
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, a preliminary thermal model for the Z-Pinch Power Plant is presented. This power plant utilizes fusion energy to generate electric energy in the GW range. The Z-Pinch Technology consists of compressing high-density plasma to produce X-rays to indirectly heat to ignition a deuterium/tritium fusion capsule. This ignition releases a minimum of 3 GJ every 10 seconds. The thermal energy generated is absorbed by the primary cycle fluid, and it is later used to power a Brayton or Rankine cycle. An advanced heat exchanger is used as the interface between the two cycles. This heat exchanger plays an important role in power plant performance. Three fluids (Flibe, Pb-17Li, and Li) were used for the plant performance analysis. The thermodynamic properties of the selected fluids determine the maximum operating temperature of the power cycles. Model results show that high temperatures (over 1000 °C) are developed in the primary cycle as needed to efficiently run the secondary cycle. The results of the performance parametric study demonstrated that the Brayton cycle exhibits better performance characteristics than the Rankine cycle for this type of application.
