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Fusion Science and Technology
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Latest News
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.
Zhiyong An, Alice Ying, Mohamed Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1101-1105
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - First Wall, Blanket, and Shield | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A834
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments on thermomechanics interactions between clad and pebble beds have been performed with overstoichiometric lithium orthosilicate pebbles (pebble diameters between 0.25 and 0.63 mm) at temperatures of 700-800°C. The experimental results show that the thermal deformation of our pebble bed system is nonlinear and when the operating temperature is higher than 600°C, thermal creep deformation is generated. In this paper, constitutive equations of the elastic and creep deformation are derived from the experimental results. Incorporating the effective constitutive equations in finite element method (FEM), numerical investigations presenting the elastic and plastic deformation characteristics of pebble bed system are comparable to the experimental behaviors. In addition, discrete element method (DEM) is underdevelopment to derive constitutive equations for different pebble beds. The preliminary results of DEM show the stress distribution inside the pebble beds at steady or transient states, which helps us to identify the destructive region in a pebble bed system.
