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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.
T. Endo, N. Kobayashi, K. Goto, M. Yasuda, Y. Fujima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 2003 | Pages 270-274
Technical Paper | Targets and Target Protection During Injection | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A266
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments on the wall-thickness dependence of the cooling-induced deformation (CID) of polystyrene (PS) spherical shells were carried out. For the experiments, the PS shells were fabricated by the density-matched emulsion method using the hand-shaken microencapsulation technique. The number-averaged and weight-averaged molecular weights of the PS were Mn = 1.1 × 105 and Mw = 4.0 × 105, respectively. The diameter of the PS shells was ~400-550 m. To investigate the wall-thickness dependence of the CID, the wall thickness of the PS shells was varied between 5 and 60 m. In the experiments, the PS shells were cooled by using liquid nitrogen, and their images were captured at 0 and -190°C. For the investigation of the CID, two shapes of each shell that were measured at 0 and -190°C were compared. The thinner PS shells showed larger CID. The maximum deformation was almost 1% of the outer radius when the shell aspect ratio (outer radius)/(wall thickness) was higher than 20. The repeatability of the CID was studied, and the results implied that residual stress in the PS shells had an influence on the CID.