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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.
Widodo Widjaja Basuki, Prachai Norajitra, Luigi Spatafora, Jarir Aktaa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 2 | October 2014 | Pages 315-321
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-773
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The design of fusion plasma-facing components is challenging, as their materials have to meet rigorous requirements in terms of low activation and high-temperature strength. At the same time, sufficient ductility is required even in the low-temperature range. Unfortunately, these properties are not found in conventional materials. To solve this problem, a hybrid material that combines the high strength of one material with the high ductility of the other material was developed. This paper presents the hybrid material, which consists of thin tungsten and vanadium layers. This hybrid material was produced by means of diffusion bonding at relatively low temperature in a vacuum chamber. Microstructural investigations and nanoindentation tests indicated no cracks, no delamination, and no brittle intermetallic phases along the bond interfaces. Investigations of the mechanical properties of the hybrid material by instrumented Charpy impact tests revealed a relatively low ductile-to-brittle transition temperature (DBTT) at 124°C (compared to the DBTT of polycrystalline tungsten of >441°C) with an absorbed Charpy impact energy of 4.53 J [kleinst (KLST)-specimen]. Additionally, the tested Charpy impact specimens were found to be not fractured thoroughly even at room temperature.
