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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.
Dakshinamoorthy Sathiyamoorthy, T. Mohanty, K. Srinivas, D. Selvaraj, D. D. Thorat
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 159-166
Technical Paper | First Joint ITER-IAEA Technical Meeting on Analysis of ITER Materials and Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13383
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-purity beryllium in the form of spherical pebbles of size ranging from 0.2 to 2 mm are required for neutron multiplication in the test blanket module of the helium-cooled solid breeder in ITER. The pebbles should be dense and have stringent chemical composition to withstand a high-temperature and irradiation environment. Hence, the conventional method of preparing beryllium pebbles has to be modified to a novel technique such as the rotating electrode process (REP). In the present paper REP modeling, design, and selection of process parameters to control the particle size have been carried out. Based on the results on the preparation of surrogate stainless steel spherical pebbles, beryllium pebbles have been prepared by REP, and the results obtained are presented. The important parameters that affect the pebble size and production rate are found to be anode diameter, material constants, revolutions per minute, arc gap, and the cooling cover gas in the REP chamber. The pebbles once formed are kept in levitated condition in the chamber for achieving near-perfect spherical shape. This paper also focuses on beryllium pebble handling with respect to safety and industrial hygiene control as per the prescribed international standard.
