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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.
B. Pégourié, Tore Supra Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | October 2009 | Pages 1334-1352
Technical Papers | Tore Supra Special Issue | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9181
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel retention in carbon plasma-facing components (PFCs) is such a major concern for next-step operation that it could prevent the use of this material in the D-T phase of ITER. Because of its complete set of actively cooled PFCs, Tore Supra offers a unique opportunity to study this phenomenon in conditions where the plasma exposure time is much longer than the thermal equilibration time of the PFCs. In addition to the main characteristics of permanent retention measured during long-discharge operation, this paper discusses the different mechanisms possibly at work in the continuous increase of the in-vessel inventory and describes the morphology and physical properties of the deposits found at several locations in the vacuum chamber. The main results are (1) that D retention mainly depends on the lower hybrid power coupled to the plasma and, to a lesser extent, on the edge temperature and fueling method, (2) that permanent D retention is mainly due to codeposition, and (3) that the hydrogenated carbon deposits present at the surface of the different PFCs are strongly disorganized graphite carbons when they are exposed to high heat fluxes, whose formation occurs through a heterogeneous growth involving both codeposition of nanoparticles and basic structural unit vapor condensates.