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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.
Enrico Lucon, Rik-Wouter Bosch, Lorenzo Malerba, Steven Van Dyck, Marc Decréton
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 895-900
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A801
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the last 20 years, fusion material programs in Europe, Japan and US have been focused on developing Reduced Activation Ferritic/Martensitic (RAFM) steels as prominent structural materials. In the European Union, within the Long Term Programme of EFDA (European Fusion Development Agreement), considerable effort has been spent by several scientific institutions for the characterization and optimization of the European reference RAFM steel (EUROFER97). Within the Belgian Nuclear Centre (SCKCEN), an integrated approach to the characterization of EUROFER97 is being consistently applied; this includes: neutron irradiations in the BR2 reactor and subsequent characterization of the unirradiated and irradiated mechanical properties (tensile, impact and fracture toughness tests); investigation of environmentally assisted cracking (more specifically, study of the influence of irradiation damage on both EAC and embrittlement in Pb-Li alloys); multiscale modelling of radiation effects and specific effects on Fe-Cr systems, using methods which range from the atomic level (MD - Molecular Dynamics) to the mesoscopic level (KMC - Kinetic Monte Carlo). This paper will provide a general overview of the above mentioned investigations, as well as highlights of the most significant results obtained in the different fields of activity.
