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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.
Sylvie Delpech, Gérard Picard, Jörgen Finne, Eric Walle, Olivier Conocar, Annabelle Laplace, Jérôme Lacquement
Nuclear Technology | Volume 163 | Number 3 | September 2008 | Pages 373-381
Technical Paper | Molten Salt Chemistry and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3996
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pyrochemical separation processes are considered to treat spent nuclear fuel and particularly to separate fission products from actinides. In order to estimate the efficiency and selectivity for various extraction processes based on a molten salt/solvent metal separation technique, we have to know the properties of the elements to be extracted in each solvent, notably their activity coefficients in the two phases. The classical way to measure the activity coefficient of an element in a liquid metal is to use a concentration cell whose the electromotive force is measured. This type of cell involves two electrodes: (a) the element investigated in its pure metallic form and (b) the element solvated in the solvent metal. The electrolyte used for this study is a chloride melt that contains the element under consideration as a solute. In this paper, an effort was made to measure activity coefficients in liquid metals by means of electrochemical techniques rather than a potentiometric technique. The experimental protocol was optimized by measuring the activity coefficient of gadolinium in liquid gallium (solvent metal) (Gd/Ga) at 530°C for several amounts of gadolinium in gallium, and log (Gd/Ga) was determined to be equal to -10.17 (mole fraction scale). Then, the temperature dependence of the activity coefficient was determined in the range of 535 to 630°C. It appears that log (Gd/Ga) varies linearly with the reciprocal value of T, thus following the theoretical variation. The electrochemical method was also performed to determine the activity coefficient of plutonium in liquid gallium at 560°C. The value of log (Pu/Ga) so obtained is equal to -8.04 (mole fraction scale). This value was confirmed using electrochemical and potentiometric measurements with a plutonium-saturated gallium electrode.
