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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.
Minsuk Seo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 12 | December 2021 | Pages 1902-1912
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1860614
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ensuring the thermal stability of heat-generating nuclear waste glass canisters in interim storage and the thermal stability of bentonite in the deep geological repository are crucial to preserving the function of the waste form. Yet thermal stability might be challenged by further heated air conditions and excessive heat load in the waste form, such that the maximum temperature would be higher than the glass transition temperature undesirably. The finite element method was carried out for the n × n × 4 (n = 1, 3, 5) multicanister system for the sake of predicting the maximum temperatures of interim storage. The internal heat source amount and exiting air temperature of the system were varied to see different storage environments. The maximum heat load of a 15.8 kW/m3 canister was in a safe range (glass transition temperature of 500°C), whereas an 18.6 kW/m3 canister was not. There is a possibility to extend thermal stability to a system larger than n = 5 for 15.8 kW/m3 based on the converging maximum temperature trends. Besides, the maximum temperature of the canister and bentonite clay in a deep geological repository is potentially below the thermal criterion if the canister cools down for about 65 to 70 years.
