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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.
Philippe M. Bardet, Boris F. Supiot, Per F. Peterson, Ömer Savas
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1192-1196
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A849
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Swirling liquid vortices can be used in fusion chambers to protect their first walls and critical elements from the harmful conditions resulting from fusion reactions. The beam tube structures in heavy ion fusion (HIF) must be shielded from high energy particles, such as neutrons, x-rays and vaporized coolant, that will cause damage. Here an annular wall jet, or vortex tube, is proposed for shielding and is generated by injecting liquid tangent to the inner surface of the tube both azimuthally and axially. Its effectiveness is closely related to the vortex tube flow properties. 3-D particle image velocimetry (PIV) is being conducted to precisely characterize its turbulent structure. The concept of annular vortex flow can be extended to a larger scale to serve as a liquid blanket for other inertial fusion and even magnetic fusion systems. For this purpose a periodic arrangement of injection and suction holes around the chamber circumference are used, generating the layer. Because it is important to match the index of refraction of the fluid with the tube material for optical measurement like PIV, a low viscosity mineral oil was identified and used that can also be employed to do scaled experiments of molten salts at high temperature.