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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.
W. Kowbel, M. Tillack
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 596-600
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A751
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial Fusion (IFE) optics presents a unique challenge. Ghoniem provides a mirror design for such an application. The surface has been chosen to be metallic, because dielectric materials exhibit great sensitivity to the effects of ionizing radiation. The leading high reflectivity candidate materials are aluminum, magnesium, silver, gold and copper. To select between these metals the following criteria were used:1) high reflectivity in the wavelength of interest2) effects of radiation on absorptivity3) surface temperature rise during the laser pulse4) thermal fatigue resistance5) radiation effects on surface deformation