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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.
B. B. Cipiti, G. E. Rochau
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 645-649
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A759
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Z-Pinch Power Plant (ZP3) uses the results from Sandia National Laboratories' Z accelerator in a power plant application to generate energy pulses using inertial confinement fusion. A collaborative project has been initiated by Sandia to investigate the scientific principles of a power generation system. Research is underway to investigate the use of recyclable transmission lines to directly connect the wire array and the hohlraum to the pulsed power driver. The resulting power plant will require an intense on-site manufacturing system to rebuild the transmission lines, wire arrays and hohlraums at a rate of 0.1 Hz per power unit. By recycling virtually all of the materials, the system is expected to be economically competitive with other power generation technologies. Current research is investigating the available approaches to manufacturing and determining the cost effectiveness of the alternatives. This paper examines the various options available for manufacturing and development requirements leading to a Proof-of-Principle experiment to demonstrate the technology.
