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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.
Sandra J. Brereton et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 879-884
ICF | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-879
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the world's largest and most powerful laser system for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and experiments studying high energy density (HED) science. NIF is a 192- beam, Nd-glass laser facility that is capable of producing 1.8 MJ, 500 TW of ultraviolet light, making it over fifty times more energetic than other existing ICF facilities. The NIF Project began in 1995 and completed in 2009. Ignition experiments using tritium on NIF have just commenced. Tritium arrives at the facility in individual fuel reservoirs that are mounted and connected to a target on the Cryogenic TARget POSitioner (TARPOS). CryoTARPOS provides the cryogenic cooling systems necessary to complete the formation of the ignition target's fuel ice layer, as well as the positioning system that transports and holds the target at the center of the NIF chamber during a shot. After a shot, unburned tritium is captured by the target chamber cryopumps. Upon regeneration, the cryopump effluent is directed to the Tritium Processing System, where elemental tritium is oxidized and captured on molecular sieve. Additional systems supporting tritium operations include area and stack tritium monitoring systems, local ventilation for contamination control, and a decontamination area that includes fume hoods and walk-in enclosures for working on contaminated components. This equipment has been used along with standard contamination control practices to manage the tritium hazard to workers and to limit releases to the environment to negligibly small amounts.