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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.
Ke Deng, Mingjun Zhang, Xijun Wu, Qin Zhang, Guo Yang, Zhaowei Ma, Fei Wei, Guanghua Wang, Wei Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1143-1153
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1590076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of its high content in irradiated nuclear graphite, tritium is treated as one of the most important radionuclides, and it should be carefully decontaminated before the final disposal of nuclear graphite. Tritium has similar chemical and physical characteristics to those of hydrogen; therefore, in this research, the adsorption and desorption of tritium in nuclear graphite using hydrogen were studied. Three kinds of nuclear graphite, IG-110, NBG-18, and NG-CT-10, were used to conduct adsorption and desorption experiments using a new method based on gas chromatography; subsequently, a first-principles calculation on graphene was carried out to simulate the desorption of hydrogen from graphite. The results showed that tritium can be weakly and strongly adsorbed in nuclear graphite. The differences found in the amount of weak adsorption within nuclear graphite were mainly due to the graphite’s porosity and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller surface area, as reported previously in similar research. The mechanism for the strong adsorption was not explained clearly; it could be attributed to the results of a combination of the various physical properties of the graphite, especially the average pore size. The amount of weakly adsorbed hydrogen ranged from 48.4% to 95.2% of the total amount of adsorption for the nuclear graphite working at a temperature of 350°C. The weakly adsorbed tritium easily escaped from the nuclear graphite, indicating that this fraction of tritium would be the main source of pollution during the dismantling or the transportation of decommissioned graphite materials. In addition, the strongly adsorbed hydrogen began to be desorbed when the nuclear graphite was heated over 600°C, and 14% to 71% of the stably adsorbed hydrogen was desorbed when the temperature reached 700°C. A first-principles calculation indicated the activation energy for desorption of tritium from graphene to be about 2.17 eV.