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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.
H. L. Wilkens, A. V. Hamza, A. Nikroo, N. E. Teslich
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 809-812
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1205
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current point design for ignition targets for the National Ignition Facility has a beryllium ablator. As Be is essentially impermeable to hydrogen, conceptually the shell will be filled by boring through the shell with a laser, then attaching a fill-tube. Examination of focused ion beam (FIB) technology is under way as an alternative to laser drilling. Holes of 40, 20, and 15 m diameter have been successfully ion milled through a 47 m thick Be layer. These holes are clean, though take several hours to make, and the geometry is limited by the aspect ratio of the depth to the diameter of the hole. Work was also done to investigate the possibility of using a FIB to create a counter-bore for the insertion and attachment of a fill-tube in a Be shell which has a pre-existing hole. Because the FIB can be controlled to sub-micron scales, the counter-bore can be easily centered on the through-hole and the side-walls and base of the counter-bore can be made very smooth. Finally, a proof-of-principle experiment was made to show that a Be wire could be attached to an in-situ micromanipulator and then be placed inside the counter-bore.