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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Kentaro Ochiai, Yury Velzilov, Takeo Nishitani, Paola Batistoni, Klaus Seidel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 378-381
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Measurement, Monitoring, and Accountancy | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A947
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium benchmark experiments with D-T neutron are a key issue to verify the tritium production rate (TPR) of the fusion blanket. The most useful method to measure the TPR in the neutron benchmark experiments is the liquid scintillation counting with Li2CO3 pellet. Ten years ago, the method of Li2CO3 pellet has been sufficiently verified the accuracy by means of D-T fast neutron irradiation and it was concluded within 10%. However, on the recent breeding blanket design, tritium is dominantly produced with the thermal neutron made with the scattering of D-T neutron and also the accuracy of the tritium production rate is requested below 10%. Therefore, previous verification is not sufficient for the recent blanket design and it is necessary to carry out the activity of the verification again. The JAERI, ENEA and TUD began to carry out the tritium benchmark experiment to verify the tritium production rate for the recent fusion blanket.
