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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.
Kamron Fazel, Qi Li, Kostadin Ivanov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 469-474
Other Concepts and Assessments | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13465
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This research explores fusion cross section enhancements from electron screening within superconductors, and the feasibility of engineering a system to extract the energy from a superconductor fusion system. There have been claims that superconductors will exhibit superscreening which could significantly increase fusion cross sections. However, there is currently no widely accepted theory to explain superconductor electron screening. This research evaluated if a net energy gain could result from fusion events within superconducting PdD. With the widely accepted critical temperature of 11 K for PdD, no net energy gain would be expected from fusion reactions. However, net energy gain may be possible if a superconductor were developed with a transition temperature above 75 K. With the uncertainty of superconductor electron screening and the possibility of fusion energy extraction, an experiment was designed to close the knowledge gap. By bombarding deuterons onto PdD below the superconducting transition temperature, the superconductor screening contribution can be determined with a 38% average uncertainty of the screening energy with 95% confidence.