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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
J. Kohagura et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 303-305
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to clarify the effects of fusion-produced neutron irradiation on silicon semiconductor x-ray detectors, the x-ray energy responses of both n- and p-type silicon tomography detectors used in the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak (n-type) and the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror (p-type) are studied using synchrotron radiation at the Photon Factory of the National Laboratory for High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK). The fusion neutronics source (FNS) of Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) is employed as well-calibrated D-T neutron source with fluences from 1013 to 1015 neutrons/cm2 onto these semiconductor detectors. Different fluence dependence is found between these two types of detectors; that is, (i) for the n-type detector, the recovery of the degraded response is found after the neutron exposure beyond around 1013 neutrons/cm2 onto the detector. A further finding is followed as a "re-degradation" by a neutron irradiation level over about 1014 neutrons/cm2. On the other hand, (ii) the energy response of the p-type detector shows only a gradual decrease with increasing neutron fluences. These properties are interpreted by our proposed theory on semiconductor x-ray responses in terms of the effects of neutrons on the effective doping concentration and the diffusion length of a semiconductor detector.
