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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.
T. Muroga, T. Tanaka, M. Kondo, T. Nagasaka, Q. Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 897-901
Test Blanket Modules | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9024
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Combination of liquid lithium with Reduced Activation Feritic/Martensitic Steel (RAFM) is one of the options for Test Blanket Module (TBM) in early ITER period and early DEMO blanket, as well as an intermediate step toward Li/V DEMO blanket. In this paper, characterization of a Li/RAFM blanket was carried out and compared with a Li/V blanket from neutronics and compatibility viewpoints.Although the local Tritium Breeding Ratio (TBR) will be reduced by ∼0.1 by the change from Li/V to Li/RAFM, Li/RAFM seems to be still feasible, with enhanced neutron shield, from the tritium self-sufficiency viewpoint. A similar tritium production rate for the Li/V and the Li/RAFM TBMs suggests that the Li/RAFM TBM simulates well the tritium production of Li/V TBM and thus will be suitable for Li/V DEMO blanket design as well as Li/RAFM blanket.Based on the available data, V-alloys are thought to be highly compatible with Li when the impurity level in the Li is low. New compatibility experiments of RAFM with Li showed transformation of martensitic to ferritic phase in addition to corrosion loss. However, the compatibility issue is estimated to be small for ITER-TBM conditions.The present study showed the significance of starting with a Li/RAFM TBM during the early phase of ITER operation for development of both Li/RAFM and Li/V DEMO blankets.
