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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Michael Rieth, Jens Reister, Bernhard Dafferner, Siegfried Baumgärtner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 381-384
Materials | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-1T3
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Many divertor design studies for future fusion reactors rely on helium gas cooling. In these concepts, pressurized tubes or channels had to be operated at maximum temperatures between 1000 °C and 1300 °C while the lowest operating temperature is preset by the coolant inlet or by specific start-up and maintenance conditions. At such extreme temperature regimes, the only reduced activation material that would provide enough strength, paired with the necessary heat conductivity, is tungsten. Therefore, various tungsten materials and alloys are often publicized as candidate material for structural divertor applications.However, there are also clear limitations. Therefore, an intensive study on the influence of microstructure and chemical composition on the fracture behavior of industrially produced tungsten materials has been perfomed. This paper reviews the results and some other relevant properties of tungsten materials with respect to possible applications for structural divertor parts. Drawbacks and possible alternatives are discussed.
