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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, S. A. Eddinger, R. B. Stephens, A. Nikroo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 380-388
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST55-380
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities are caused by features that affect shock velocity. These features can be statistically measured by radiography. We designed a precision radiography (PR) system that measures X-ray opacity variations in National Ignition Facility (NIF) ablator capsules to 10-4. Quantitative interpretation of the PR data is challenging and is the subject of this paper. The PR opacity power spectrum (PS) must be related to the NIF surface PS requirements (commonly known as the "NIF curves"). This relationship must be calculated for each specific shell. The compounding factors include X-ray spectra and spot size, detector resolution, shell diameter, coating thickness, dopant and impurity levels, and the coherency status of interface roughness between different layers. In this work, we developed a useful tool to quickly compute the NIF opacity curve (more precisely referred to as NIF "OD [optical depth] PS reference curve" in this paper) for any partially coated NIF shells or nonstandard developmental shells. This allows more rapid feedback on the quality of shells using only partially coated shells and enables benchmarking between the opacity (measured by a radiographic instrument) and surface roughness (measured by an atomic force microscope).