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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.
Marie-Françoise Maday
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 861-865
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A794
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hydrogen embrittlement behaviour of the reduced activation ferritic/martensitic steels, Eurofer'97 and VS3104, has been compared to that of the conventional alloy T91, by means of constant extension rate tests run under dynamic electrochemical charging. Charged versus uncharged reduction of specimen area ratios at rupture were taken as the most suitable ductility indexes for material discrimination in terms of hydrogen damage resistance. Fractographic analysis indicated that hydrogen content as low as 1.6 wppm caused rupture of al investigated steels, but to different degree, by promoting grain boundary decohesion. Higher hydrogen levels stimulated failure by the combined effect of bond strength weakening and stress intensification from dislocation blocking at interfaces. The better performances of T91 as well as the variability of Eurofer tensile responses were ascribed to the different chemistry and density of key microstructural factors, already suspected from metallurgical examination and further supported by hydrogen thermal extraction results.
