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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. Konys, A. Aiello, G. Benamati, L. Giancarli
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 844-850
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A791
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium permeation can be significantly reduced by a suitable barrier on the structural materials of a future fusion power plant. Since alumina has the capability of tritium permeation reduction, the development of such coatings on ferritic martensitic steels by different techniques like hot-dip aluminizing (HDA) by Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany (FZK) and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) by Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, France (CEA) was funded by the European Commission (EC) during the last 10 years. The final objective was to identify a so-called reference coating for structural components of a lithium-lead cooled blanket.This paper describes the process specifications and the results of the corresponding hydrogen permeation measurements, performed at ENEA, Brasimone, Italy. The results for CVD and HDA coating showed clearly, that Permeation Reduction Factor's (PRF) of >1000 were sufficiently exceeded in H2 gas, but much lower values were obtained in the Pb-17Li melt. The post mortem analysis revealed that surface imperfections and spallation of parts of the coatings were responsible for the too low PRF's. Because of shifting of priorities and changes in the blanket design from WCLL to HCLL, the EU funding of all major R&D activities was postponed in 2002 until the redesign of the European Blanket Concepts was finished.