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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.
Alexey Stankovsky, Masaki Saito, Vladimir V. Artissiouk, Anatoly N. Shmelev, Hiroshi Sagara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 4 | June 2003 | Pages 569-579
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A302
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In view of the poor transmutation environments in fission reactors, elimination of long-lived fission products (FPs) remains an unresolved problem in the quest for a harmonized nuclear energy system. Since plasma fusion technology could provide effective neutron support, it is important to elaborate the qualities, features, and dimensions of a fusion neutron source exclusively oriented to FP transmutation, and this forms the main objective of this paper. Recent trends in fusion technology are examined to shape the conceptual blanket design features for D-T- and D-D-driven transmuters that match the demanding set of transmutation requirements. Material behavior under neutron irradiation in these blankets constitutes the central issue underlying this paper and yields the operational limits and radiological cost of FP incineration.
