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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.
A. Hassanein, J. P. Allain, Z. Insepov, I. Konkashbaev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 686-697
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Divertor and Plasma-Facing Components | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A765
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the critical technological challenges of future tokamak fusion devices is the ability for plasma-facing components to handle both normal and abnormal plasma/surface interaction events that compromise their lifetime and operation of the machine. Under normal operation plasma/surface interactions that are important include: sputtering, particle implantation and recycling, He pumping and ELM (edge localized modes)-induced erosion. In abnormal or off-normal operation: disruptions and vertical displacement events (VDEs) are important. To extend PFC lifetime under these conditions, liquid-metals have been considered as candidate PFCs (Plasma-Facing Components), including: liquid lithium, tin-lithium, gallium and tin.Liquid lithium has been measured to have nonlinear increase of physical sputtering with rise in temperature. Such increase can be a result of exposure to ELM-level particle fluxes. The significant increase in particle flux to the divertor and nearby PFCs can enhance sputtering erosion by an order of magnitude or more. In addition from the standpoint of hydrogen recycling and helium pumping liquid lithium appears to be a good candidate plasma-facing material (PFM). Advanced designs of first wall and divertor systems propose the application of liquid-metals as an alternate PFC to contend with high-heat flux constraints of large-scale tokamak devices. Additional issues include PFC operation under disruptions and long temporal instabilities such as VDEs. A comprehensive two-fluid model is developed to integrate core and SOL (scrape-off layer) parameters during ELMs with PFC surface evolution using the HEIGHTS package. Special emphasis is made on the application of lithium as a candidate plasma-facing liquid-metal.
