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Latest News
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.
Katsushi Matsuoka, Makoto Kobayashi, Rie Kurata, Junya Osuo, Naoko Ashikawa, Akio Sagara, Yasuhisa Oya, Kenji Okuno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 412-416
Materials Development & Plasma-Material Interactions | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12391
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Impurity effects on chemical behavior of energetic deuterium implanted into the carbon-oxygen containing boron films were investigated as a function of impurity concentrations by means of XPS and TDS. This study was carried out for about 40% impurities-containing boron films. It was found that a major chemical state of carbon was C-B bond and that of oxygen was free oxygen for the carbon-oxygen containing boron films. Most of deuterium was trapped by the C-B bond to form a B-C-D bond. On the other hand, free oxygen formed heavy water (D2O) and released as D2O during deuterium implantation. The amount of deuterium trapped by carbon was increased as the carbon concentration increased. However, the deuterium retention for the carbon-oxygen containing boron film with less than 20% carbon was almost twice as high as that for the only about 20% carbon-containing boron films. It was also indicated that the formation of free carbon was refrained due to the existence of free oxygen which induce the increase of C-B bond in about 40% impurities-containing boron films. These results indicate that hydrogen isotopes were trapped as B-C-D bond, which released deuterium at 900 K, in lower carbon concentration as oxygen coexists with carbon in the boron films. It was concluded that impurity concentration should be kept as low as possible to prevent tritium retention in the boron film deposited on the first wall in future fusion devices.
