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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
S. Bednarczyk, I. Geoffray, G. Perron, O. Legaie, Ph. Baclet
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 813-817
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST49-813
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the last years, many applications of pulsed laser in precision machining have been demonstrated. Short pulse durations (nanosecond, picosecond and femtosecond) and short wavelength (U.V. and visible) create small heat-affected zones during the interaction with material such as polymers or metals. In the case of excimer lasers, energy carried by ultra-violet photon is sufficient to break apart molecular bonds without thermal effects, particularly in the case of the 3.7 eV C=H bond. All these properties facilitate high spatial resolution and high accuracy processes. This is especially true in the case of high absorbing carbon-hydrogen polymers.An excimer multipulses engraving technique using time-resolved surface ablation was developped using our home-made laser micro-machining work station. This four-axis work station is composed of motor-controlled translation and rotation stages. This experimental set-up was designed to pattern 3D object by the mean of the association of rotative and translative motions. Sinusoidal recording on polystyrene, polyimide and GDP polymers about ten micrometers spatial frequency and a few micrometers amplitude were performed using binary masks with particular shapes.Applications to hydrodynamics modes growth (which have detrimental effect on fusion burn in the "Megajoule laser" LMJ CH-GDP -shell) measurements will be performed on OMEGA laser facility.