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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.
Mukio Fukuhara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 128-133
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A254
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
From symmetric meson theory, the formation of helium nucleus from two deuterons, i.e., fusion, requires necessarily a direct force due to exchange of two neutral pions, which do not actually compose the deuteron nucleus. The neutral pions are provided by two photons, which are produced by emission of excited collective electrons derived from the palladium atoms. The introduction of the pions makes it possible to reduce remarkably an internuclear distance, enhancing the fusion rate for helium formation. The dynamic interaction is interpreted as the result of condensation of deuterons into octahedral interstitial sites by electrolysis and contraction of the deuteron octahedra around the Pd10- atom with the help of the electron-phonon charge-density wave coupling.
