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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. F. Latkowski, R. P. Abbott, R. C. Schmitt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 591-595
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A750
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dry-wall inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants must survive repeated exposure to target threats that include x-rays, ions, and neutrons. While this exposure may lead to sputtering, exfoliation, transmutation, and swelling, more basic effects are thermomechanical in nature. In the present work, we use the newly developed RadHeat code to predict time-temperature profiles in a tungsten armor, which has been proposed for use in an IFE power plant. The XAPPER x-ray damage experiment is used to simulate thermal effects by operating at fluences that produce similar peak temperatures, temperature gradients, or thermomechanical stresses. Soft x-ray fluences in excess of 1 J/cm2 are possible. Using RadHeat, we determine the XAPPER x-ray fluence needed to match expected peak surface temperatures. Such calculations are the first step in predicting the thermomechanical effects that are expected in an IFE system. Here, we report our findings and detail directions for future experiments and modeling.
