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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Kurt J. Boehm, A. R. Raffray, N. B. Alexander, D. T. Frey, D. T. Goodin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 422-426
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8938
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fluidized bed is being studied as a very promising method for mass production of IFE targets. Large beds could be filled with many targets to provide large-scale production, while a near-isothermal environment could be maintained in principle around each target (as required for smooth layering to meet the physics requirements on the ice characteristics) through the random movement and spin of individual targets within a precisely controlled gas stream. Concerns exist, however, including the effect of unbalanced spheres on the bed behavior and ultimately on the target thermal environment, as well as the possible damage of the target surface (in particular the thin high-Z coating).This effort includes developing a numerical fluidized bed model and conducting laboratory-scale companion experiments to help understand the cryogenic fluidized bed behavior. Key challenges in developing the model include the relative size of the spherical targets (~4.0 mm) compared to the size of the prototypic fluidized bed container (~26 mm in diameter), which is much larger than those found in conventional fluidized bed models and which calls for a different modeling approach. In addition, the behavior of unbalanced targets, which results from the initial D-T filling and freezing in the target production process, needs to be accounted for.This paper summarizes the development of this model, including the validation performed by comparing the model results to controlled lab-scale experiments. The goal is to use the model for parametric analysis to help determine the most promising state of operation to deliver large quantities of uniformly layered target shells. This will provide key pre-operational input to the prototypical experimental set-up, which is currently being built and which includes a high-pressure deuterium filling station in addition to the cryogenic fluidized bed operating at temperatures around 18 K.