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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.
K. Kotoh et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 173-178
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8897
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the purpose of developing a cryogenic pressure swing adsorption (PSA) system, we have been studying the breakthrough behavior of hydrogen isotopes with synthetic zeolite packed-beds under conditions specified for designing a PSA process. Previously, we have reported that overshooting breakthrough curves of tracer D2 in H2 were obtained from experiments of exchange-adsorption carried out after replenishing a packed-bed column with H2 from its outlet, following evacuation for a given period. The overshooting behavior is considered due to the enrichment of the heavier component D2 not only in the adsorption process but also in the evacuation process. In the next work, we have examined the effects of priming flow rates and evacuation periods on the overshooting behavior, using synthetic zeolites 5A and 13X packed-bed columns. In this paper, it is reported that the overshooting profile depends on the conditions of evacuation but not sensitively on the mass flow rates in replenishing process. The overshooting is advantageous for the adsorption process, because of improvement of the breakthrough time. Since the replenishing period is shortened proportionally to the priming flow late, the insensitive dependence of the overshooting on the priming flow rate is favorable to the PSA process, resulting in saving the time for replenishing process.
