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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.
Nobukatsu Nemoto, Keiji Nagai, Yoshitaka Ono, Kei Tanji, Tomoya Tanji, Mitsuo Nakai, Takayoshi Norimatsu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 695-700
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1188
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with the development of materials without volume change in the formation of uniform low density foam capsules with fine structures. Two monomers, i.e., 5-(4-vinylbenzyl)oxymethyl-5-methyl-1,3-dioxane-2-thione (M1) and 4-vinylphenyloxirane (M2), were prepared as the comonomers polymerized with styrene. Polystyrene-based copolymers using styrene and M1 or M2 were prepared by free radical copolymerization using azobis(isobutyronitrile) (AIBN) as an initiator. The solutions of the obtained polystyrene-based copolymers in benzene/dichloromethane mixture or 4-chlorotoluene were gelated by the addition of a cationic initiator, which caused cross-linking via ring-opening polymerization of the pendant cyclic moieties. The gel was transformed into an aerogel by exchanging solvent to 2-propanol, and removal of 2-propanol using supercritical CO2. SEM images of a cross sectional view of the aerogel indicated that sub-micrometer voids were distributed randomly, and most of parts look filled bulk morphology. The density of the gel obtained from the present polystyrene-based copolymers was estimated to be 200 mg/cm , which implies existence of vacancies without observation in the SEM image, suggesting the extremely fine cell structure.