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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
S. Sharafat, N. Ghoniem, B. Williams, J. Babcock
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 886-890
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A799
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ceramic foam and cellular materials are being used in a wide variety of industries and are finding ever growing number of applications. Over the past decade advances in manufacturing of cellular materials have resulted in ceramics with highly uniform interconnected porosities ranging in size from a few m to several mm. These relatively new ceramic foam materials have a unique set of thermo-mechanical properties, such as excellent thermal shock resistance and high surface to volume ratios. Based on new advances in processing ceramic foams, we suggest the development of ceramic foams or cellular ceramics for solid breeders in fusion reactor blankets. A cellular breeder material has a number of thermo-mechanical advantages over pebble beds, which can enhance blanket performance, improve operational stability, and reduce overall blanket costs.
