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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.
C. A. Frederick, R. R. Paguio, A. Nikroo, J. H. Hund, O. Acennas, M. Thi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 657-662
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1182
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Resorcinol Formaldehyde (R/F) foam has been used in the fabrication of direct drive shell targets for Inertial Fusion Confinement (ICF) experiments at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). Recent cryogenic experiments at LLE using R/F shells have shown the necessity of larger pore foam compared to the standard R/F formulation. In this paper, we report controlling the pore size of R/F foam with concomitant control of the gelation time, which is crucial for successful shell fabrication. The "standard" formulation, with pores of <100 nm, was modified by decreasing the base catalyst to resorcinol concentration ratio creating a large pore R/F foam (~ >0.5 m) through reaction limited aggregation. However, this formulation decreased the gelation time, which decreased the yield of shells with proper wall uniformity (~ 30%) to an unacceptable level of <1%. We developed a technique to achieve control over the gelation time, while keeping the large pore characteristics of R/F to improve shell non-uniformity and increasing the yield to an acceptable level. We also developed a new technique for large pore formation involving changes to the acid catalyst concentration. The effects of this new formulation on the wall uniformity of shells are discussed. The pore distributions obtained using these new R/F foams were characterized using a variety of techniques, including electron microscopy, nitrogen gas adsorption, visible spectroscopy, and small angle x-ray scattering and compared to the standard small pore formulation.