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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.
Peter S. Ebey, James M. Dole, Arthur Nobile, Jon R. Schoonover, John Burmann, Bob Cook, Steve Letts, Jorge Sanchez, Abbas Nikroo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 859-864
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1214
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of the experiments described in this paper was to expose samples of polymeric materials to a mixture of deuterium-tritium (DT) gas at elevated temperature and pressure to investigate the effects (i.e., damage) on the materials. The materials and exposure parameters were chosen to be relevant to proposed uses of similar materials in inertial fusion ignition experiments at the National Ignition Facility. Two types of samples were exposed and tested. The first type consisted of 10 4-lead ribbon cables of fine manganin wire insulated with polyimide. Wires of this type are proposed for use in thermal shimming of hohlraums and the goal of this experiment was to measure the change in electrical resistance of the insulation due to tritium exposure. The second type of sample consisted of 20 planar polymer samples that may be used as ignition capsule materials. The exposure was at 34.5 GPa (5010 psia) and 70°C for 48 h. The change in electrical resistance of the wire insulation will be presented. The results for capsule materials will be presented in a separate paper in this issue.
