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Latest News
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.
Sal B. Rodríguez, Vincent J. Dandini, Virginia L. Vigíl, Matt Turgeon, Dave Louie
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 656-661
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A761
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We are investigating attenuation techniques to mitigate the powerful shock that occurs inside the Z-Pinch Power Plant. For this purpose, we conducted a series of experiments at the University of Wisconsin. These experiments consisted of shock waves traveling at greater than Ma 1 that impacted aluminum foam under various configurations. In turn, ABAQUS, ALEGRA, CTH, and DYNA3D were used to simulate one of the experiments in order to validate the codes. Although the behavior of foamed solid and liquid metal is fundamentally different, we considered foamed metal because some disposable components of the ZP-3 (i.e. the RTL) may be designed with metal foam. In addition, the relatively simple experiments should help us determine which codes can better simulate shock waves. In the near future, we will conduct shock experiments using foamed materials such as water, oils, and other metals.