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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. Linke et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 678-685
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Divertor and Plasma-Facing Components | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A764
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The development of plasma facing components for next step fusion devices in Europe is strongly focused to ITER. Here a wide spectrum of different design options for the divertor target and the first wall have been investigated with tungsten, CFC, and beryllium armor. Electron beam simulation experiments have been used to determine the performance of high heat flux components under ITER specific thermal loads. Beside thermal fatigue loads with power density levels up to 20 MWm-2, off-normal events are a serious concern for the lifetime of plasma facing components. These phenomena are expected to occur on a time scale of a few milliseconds (plasma disruptions) or several hundred milliseconds (vertical displacement events) and have been identified as a major source for the production of neutron activated metallic or tritium enriched carbon dust which is of serious importance from a safety point of view.The irradiation induced material degradation is another critical concern for future D-T-burning fusion devices. In ITER the integrated neutron fluence to the first wall and the divertor armour will remain in the order of 1 dpa and 0.7 dpa, respectively. This value is low compared to future commercial fusion reactors; nevertheless, a nonnegligible degradation of the materials has been detected, both for mechanical and thermal properties, in particular for the thermal conductivity of carbon based materials. Beside the degradation of individual material properties, the high heat flux performance of actively cooled plasma facing components has been investigated under ITER specific thermal and neutron loads.