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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.
David L. Hanson, Stephen A. Slutz, Roger A. Vesey, Michael E. Cuneo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 3 | April 2006 | Pages 500-516
Technical Paper | Fast Ignition | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1163
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fast ignition fusion targets require a uniform cryogenic D-T fuel layer for efficient fuel assembly. Uniform beta layering of solid D-T fuel within a fast ignition capsule will be complicated by the presence of a reentrant cone for short-pulse laser access. We discuss an alternative approach to cryogenic fast ignition targets currently being developed at Sandia National Laboratories in which a liquid cryogenic fuel layer is condensed from a low-pressure external gas supply and confined between concentric plastic shells. This concentric-shell cryogenic liquid fuel target concept is particularly well adapted to a hemispherical capsule configuration for single-sided X-ray drive. Liquid cryogenic D-T targets have a number of potential advantages, including greatly reduced system cost, temperature control, fill time, and cryogenic handling requirements, compared to beta-layered D-T targets. The shape and surface quality of the liquid fuel layer is determined entirely by the bounding shells, opening the possibility for simplified fast ignition fusion energy targets. Technology issues for target fabrication are discussed, and radiation-hydrodynamics simulations of liquid fuel capsule performance are presented.
