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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.
Matthew F. Wolford, John D. Sethian, Matthew C. Myers, Frank Hegeler, John L. Giuliani, Stephen P. Obenschain
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 179-186
IFE | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-502
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is developing the krypton fluoride (KrF) laser technology for a direct drive laser inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plant. The overall projected wall plug efficiency for KrF laser system is ~7%, including thermal management and optical losses. There are two KrF lasers at NRL. The first, Nike, provides up to 3 kJ of laser light per shot for experimental research in KrF laser-target interactions. The Electra Laser at NRL is a repetitively pulsed electron beam pumped 700 Joule KrF laser facility. The objective with Electra is to develop technologies to meet the IFE requirements for repetition rate, efficiency, and durability. Electra produces over 750 Joules in oscillator mode. Based on experiments, there is expected to be virtually no degradation in the laser focal profile, even at 5 Hz, high efficiency operation. Progress in durability has lead to achievement of KrF laser runs for 10 continuous hours at 2.5 Hz (90,000 shots) and 100 minutes at 5 Hz (over 30,000 shots). The main impediment to achieving long duration runs is the present pulsed power system that is based on spark gap switches. NRL has developed a new all solid state system that has operated for 11 million pulses continuously at 10 Hz and is based on components attaining 300 million pulses. These studies show an electron beam pumped KrF laser should be a viable approach for a laser fusion energy driver.
