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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.
Kenji Kotoh, Masashi Kawahara, Keisuke Kimura, Kazuhiko Kudo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 179-183
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8898
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Cryogenic pumps are convenient machinery for handling hydrogen isotopes in fusion fuel processing systems. Not only ultra-vacuum pumps working at such as liquid helium or hydrogen temperature but also sorption pumps using liquid nitrogen are applicable. The latter type is suitable to a means of temporary storage and/or transportation between process units. In the cryogenic pumping, there is an issue that the pressure in a pump is not necessarily identical with the pressure measured in its evacuating vessel in equilibrium, because of an effect of thermal transpiration. Thermal transpiration is important in adsorption isotherms which characterize cryo-sorption pumping. In this study, the effect of thermal transpiration was investigated for He, H2 and D2 in a closed system consisting of a volume at room temperature and a volume at cryogenic temperature, connected together by a simple narrow pipe or a pipe containing baffle plates as thermal shield. The effect is here described by an equation of nominal-distribution function with respect to the pressure measured in the hot end volume. Defining an effective inner diameter for the latter pipe, agreement is shown of characteristic curves for geometrically different pipes. The error-functional curves for H2 and D2 are agreed together. The curve for He is also perfectly approximated but with a constant shift. This shift results in the difference of a molecular property among He, H2 and D2.