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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
H. Huang, A. Nikroo, R. B. Stephens, S. A. Eddinger, D. R. Wall, K. A. Moreno, H. W. Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 356-366
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST55-356
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
National Ignition Facility (NIF) specifications require nondestructive, independent profiling of copper, argon, and oxygen in a delivered beryllium capsule. We use a combination of two methods to accomplish this goal: (a) model-enhanced energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) of witness shell fragments for destructive profiling of all three elements in a select sample within a batch and (b) differential radiography (DR) to profile copper and argon on multiple shells to nondestructively prove the sample-to-sample consistency within a batch. This combination fully qualifies the delivered shells. For EDS, we developed a physics model and fabricated standards to quantify low concentrations of relatively light elements in a very low-Z matrix. For model validation, we produced sputtered beryllium capsules containing a single dopant in each shell and used contact radiography (CR) to characterize the dopant profiles to 5 to 10% accuracy. The copper calibration was also checked against bulk Cu-Be standards with known composition, and the argon and oxygen calibrations were also checked against the X-ray absorption edge spectroscopy (Edge method) and the weight gain methods. Together, the EDS method gives ±0.1, ±0.05, and ±0.2 at.% accuracy for copper, argon, and oxygen, respectively, in NIF specification capsules. For DR, we conduct two CR measurements with the X-ray tube running at 9 and 30 kVp, respectively. The differential response between copper and argon enables elemental separation. The dopant profiles can be measured to ±0.1 at.% for NIF specification capsules. The oxygen profile in DR must be inferred from the EDS measurement. In the production work flow, we use EDS to obtain the oxygen profile and use it as input to the DR measurement. We then check that the copper and argon profiles obtained from DR and those from EDS are consistent. The average argon and copper contents from either method can also be checked against the results from the Edge method. These two levels of cross-checks offer critical assurances to the data integrity in production metrology.
