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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. T. Bousquet, J. F. Hund, D. T. Goodin, N. B. Alexander
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 446-449
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST55-446
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The horizontal rotary glow discharge polymer (GDP) coater is being developed to help increase the production rate of inertial confinement fusion targets and to meet the very high production rates needed for inertial fusion energy targets. The coater is used to put a conformal GDP gas retention coating on top of foam shell targets. A number of alterations to the design and operation of the horizontal rotary GDP coater are discussed. Compared to previous iterations of the horizontal coater, the changes have resulted in improving the yield of gas retentive targets with thinner coatings and increasing the coating rate, smoothness, and uniformity. The number of targets that can be coated at once has increased from tens to hundreds, or even thousands. The alterations include changing the coating tube configuration; adjusting the coating pressures; and altering the radio-frequency power, gas flow rates, and tube rotation rates. Methods to further improve the coater are also discussed.
