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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
F. L. Chong, J. L. Chen, Z. J. Zhou, J. G. Li
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 3 | April 2008 | Pages 854-859
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1740
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Five-layered W/Cu functionally graded materials with fine grain sizes of 0.2, 1, and 7 m were fabricated by resistance sintering under ultrahigh pressure. Microstructure analysis found that they have a good graded composition distribution and mechanical properties. After about 2000 s edge plasma exposure in the HT-7 superconducting tokamak, the results indicated that the fine-grained tungsten can enhance mechanical strength, and it is favorable to hold back crack propagation and growth; however, the effects on impurity deposition and compound formation were not obvious.
