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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.
Takeo Nishitani, Mikio Enoeda, Masato Akiba, Toshihiko Yamanishi, Kimio Hayashi, Hiroyasu Tanigawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 971-978
Technical Paper | Tritium, Safety, and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) plays a role of the principal institute in Japan for the design and the development of a solid breeder (WCSB) blanket and a helium cooled solid breeder (HCSB) blanket, in the ITER Test Blanket Modules (TBM) programt. The WCSB and HCSB modules consist of reduced activation ferritic/martensitic steel, F82H, as the structural material, Li2TiO3 as the tritium breeder material, beryllium or Be-Ti alloy as the neutron multiplier. One of the R&Ds for the WCSB TBM, the mockup of the first wall with embedded cooling channels was fabricated by applying HIP technique. Pebbles of Be12Ti, which is a candidate material for the advanced neutron multiplier, were produced by a small-scale rotating electrode method. Mechanical and chemical properties and irradiation effects have been studied for Be12T pebbles. Both oxidation and steam interaction were about 1/1000 as small as those of beryllium metal, which indicates a possibility to reduce a risk of a water or air ingress accident. The test schedule of TBMs is discussed according to the ITER operation phases.