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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.
A. Iwamoto et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 427-432
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8939
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel layering of a cryogenic target with a conical laser guide such as the FIREX target is complicated because of its non-spherical symmetry appearance. To simplify the layering, a foam layer is planned to utilize as a supporting material of fuel. Ideally, the foam shell has self-fuel-layering ability at a liquid state owing to the capillarity of the foam material. For stable fuel compression in laser experiments, the fuel must be solid with a lower saturated pressure. The transition to a solid state expects to cause random fuel crystallization and voids from the density difference between liquid and solid. A volumetric heat load might help to finish fuel layering even in the foam shell. Solid fuel redistribution will ignore the foam boundary. Temperature control in the target, therefore, is required during the formation of a uniform layer. For the rough estimation of the target temperature, the possibility of the ANSYS code was confirmed compared with the experiment using a dummy target. Then, steady state temperature profiles of the FIREX target were calculated using the ANSYS code. Temperature control to practically realize a uniform solid fuel layer in the FIREX target is discussed.